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INTERPRETATION, GENDER, AND THE READER: ANGELA CARTER'S

SELF-CONSCIOUS NOVELS

Suzanne Hall

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

In the Department of English Literature

University of Glasgow

June 1991

Suzanne Hall, 1991

 CONTENTS

Abstract iii
...............................................

Acknowledgements v
.........................................

Introduction 1
.............................................

Chapter 1: Nights at the Circus: Reporting,

Reviewing, Reading 34
......................................

Chapter 2: Interpreting Desire: Centres and

Margins in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman 85
.................................................

Chapter 3: The Character of Angela Carter's 'Characters':

The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love, and The
Passion of New Eve ..................................... 134

Chapter 4: The Character of 'Woman' and the

Question of Pornography in The Passion of New Eve
and The Sadeian Woman 202
..................................

Chapter 5: The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I:

The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, and
The Passion of New Eve ................................. 262

Chapter 6: The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II:

Nights at the Circus 327
...................................

Bibliography 384
...........................................

Appendix 403
...............................................
 iii

ABSTRACT

INTERPRETATION, GENDER, AND THE READER: ANGELA CARTER'S

SELF-CONSCIOUS NOVELS

by Suzanne Hall

This thesis attempts to account for the unusual

problems raised for interpretation by the works of Angela
Carter, as well as the particular pleasures which they
provide. It demonstrates how Carter's self-conscious
novels speculate about the very nature of fiction and, in
doing so, challenge conventions which govern the way we
interpret not only fiction but also ourselves and our
world. The second half of the thesis is concerned with
issues of sexual difference, specifically the strategies
used by Carter to demystify the false universals which
govern gender politics.

Chapter 1 engages with both Nights at the Circus and

a selection of reviews of Carter's work in order to
establish the particular reader/text relationships which
her fiction demands. The breakdown of the traditional
distinction between centre and margins in The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is the focus of Chapter
2: this chapter incorporates Jacques Derrida's model of
invagination in its examination of the distinctive
intertextual qualities Carter's work displays. Chapters 3
and 4 demonstrate an important strategic technique
employed by Carter's novels to expose and exploit specific
reading conventions which underlie the interpretation of
character, identity, and gender. Chapter 3 shows how four
novels, The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love, and
The Passion of New Eve, promote a 'realist' mode of
reading character whilst continually reminding the reader
that character is a construction, in order to demonstrate
the power of the conventions which create the illusion of
knowable individuals both within and outside fiction.
Chapter 4 shows how The Passion of New Eve foregrounds a
central feminist question, 'What is a Woman? ' This
chapter examines the ways in which Carter utilises gender
stereotypes, particularly those used to define the female
body, in order to debunk them. It also contains an
 iv

account of the debate about pornography which Carter's

work has excited amongst critics. Finally, Chapters 5 and
6 discuss the New Eve figures which recur across Carter's
fiction and examine the affirmative feminist politics
which sustain it. Chapter 5 asks the question, 'What
constitutes a liberated female subject? ' while Chapter 6,
returning to Nights at the Circus, celebrates Fevvers as
just such a figure. Each chapter demonstrates how
Carter's work continually anticipates readers' responses
and dramatises its own fictional procedures. Each chapter
also attempts to illuminate, from a variety of
perspectives, the liberating 'reading space, ' which her
fiction opens up.
 V

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dorothy

Porter, for her close and careful readings. A number of
other people have read drafts of individual chapters and
offered invaluable critical commentary. All have
proffered not only their professional expertise but also
both enthusiasm and support. I am grateful to Elin
Diamond, Hugh English, Tom Furniss, Cleo Kearns, George
Kearns, Christine Roulston, and Cynthia Scheinberg for
their insights, their time, and their care. I would
especially like to acknowledge Cora Kaplan, who stepped in
at a crucial moment nearing the end of this project, and
whose thoughtful and enlightening advice proved an
enormous boost to my morale. To my parents I owe special
thanks for their transatlantic nurturing; and thank you to
my daughter Laura Catherine Attridge who has taught me so
much as she and the thesis have grown together. Finally,
I would like to dedicate this thesis to Derek Attridge
with love and with gratitude. His endless, endless
patience has enabled me to accomplish what, on so many
occasions, seemed the impossible.
 INTRODUCTION

Just as anything that wants to call itself a

novel is a novel, by definition, so fiction can
do anything it wants to do. I think it can do
more things than we tend to think it can.

Angela Carter'

1 in (London:
John Haffenden, Novelists Interview
Methuen, 1985), p. 79 (henceforth referred to as
Novelists).
Introduction 2

Although Angela Carter is widely accepted as being

among the major contemporary novelists in Britain, there

is still very little extended criticism of her work and no

booklength study. Since I began work on this thesis in

1985, the bibliography of Carter studies has grown

steadily. At the time of writing, however, there are only

twenty-three published articles (in English), and only

half of these engage specifically with her novels; the

others deal largely with her short fiction, particularly

her controversial rewritings of fairytales in The Bloody

Chamber. 2 journalism is the

In many ways, perhaps most

productive medium for situating contemporary novelists,

and there are a large number of reviews--the publication

of a new work by Carter is always an event for the general

reader even if the published fiction has enticed

relatively few academics. The quality of review material,

of course, varies enormously, but some of the commentary

on Carter's work is very suggestive. This may, in part,

reflect Carter's own journalistic skills, and her

particular style of writing. Reviewers tend to polarise

into her 3
those who love and those who hate work, and part

2A the
series of articles about pornographic
tendencies of The Bloody Chamber have been published.
summarise their arguments in Chapter 4.

All references to Carter's work will be to the

editions listed in Bibliography 1, and page numbers will
be given in the text.

This3 is not always in after

so obvious reviews
Nights at the Circus and the film The Company of Wolves,
which established Carter's reputation more firmly.
Subsequent antipathetic reviewers attempt to disguise
Introduction 3

of the aim of this thesis is to ascertain what it is about

Carter's writing which generates such extreme responses.

Many reviewers identify Carter as a writer concerned with

transformation and change, whose writing is affirmative

and constructive in a way that much contemporary fiction,

particularly fiction by women, is not. But, although

these reviewers try to specify the sorts of change which

Carter's fictions appear to promote, several also admit

that it is extremely difficult to do so. The reviews

highlight the problem of interpretation, the specific

difficulties that readers--not necessarily academics--have

with Carter's fiction; and this is a continuing concern of

the thesis. I have incorporated a survey of these reviews

into the first chapter, and draw on a selection to inform

the rest of the thesis. (The Appendix gives full details

of all reviews consulted. )

What the reviews demonstrate most vividly is how

difficult it is to place Angela Carter's work. One of the

tasks of this thesis is to account for what is special

about her work; one of the tasks of this introduction is

to situate Carter's fiction by describing briefly how it

resembles or differs from that of other contemporary

'feminist' in 4 Carter's
writers, and writers particular.

fiction, however, resists categorization: her work does

their intense distaste for her work behind a rather

reluctant recognition of her writing skills.

4 Reviewers to Carter's fiction

also attempt place
by identifying literary influences; see Chapter 2.
Introduction 4

not fit comfortably into any particular school of writing,

and has been given many different, and often

contradictory, labels. Lorna Sage points out that

'"placing" Angela Carter [is] particularly difficult, '5

Ian McEwan claims that she is not 'all that assimilable,

and one suspects she would not want to be, '6 and Eve

Harvey writes:

In our compartmentalised, prepackaged world

Angela Carter is an anomaly, a publisher's
nightmare. Like Doris Lessing, she is one of
those rare writers who defy classification; the
only suitable category is that unfortunately
sparsely populated area where litýrary
excellence is the main criterion.

This difficulty may partly explain why there has been so

little extended criticism of her work.

Angela Carter has been called a 'postmodern' writer,

but this is a problematic characterisation since the term

usually describes a predominantly male field of

experimental writing. George Kearns, at the opening of a

review of several contemporary (male) writers, lists a

number of features of postmodernist fiction and concludes:

'Characteristically male, it has been known to show up as

5 Lorna
Sage, Biography
Dictionary of Literary
(henceforth referred to as DLB) (Detroit, Michigan:
Bruccoli Clark, 1982), Vol. 14, 'British Novelists Since
1960, ' pp. 205-12 (p. 205).
6 'Sweet Smell Excess, ' profile by Ian McEwan,
of
Sunday Times Magazine, 9 September 1984,42-44 (p. 42).

7 introduction "'Fools
Eve Harvey, to are my theme,
Let satire be my song, "' in Vector, 109 (1982), 26-36
(p. 26).
Introduction 5

"Angela Carter. "'8 Kearns's joke, however, is a telling

one: two authors (both female) of recently published

books concerned specifically with so-called

'postmodernist' fiction both explain that their brief

excludes fiction by women. Marguerite Alexander, in

Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in

Postmodernist British and American Fiction, mentions

Angela Carter's work only in passing in order to admit

that be 9
she will not discussing any women's writing.

Similarly, Alison Lee explains that all of the texts under

consideration in her book, Realism and Power: Postmodern

British Fiction, are by men, although in the very same

paragraph she acknowledges the irony that 'feminist

postmodern writers have been marginalized even within

...
a fiction which concerns itself with questioning margins

and boundaries valorized by the dominant cultural

authority. ' Lee is summarising an argument in Patricia

Waugh's Feminine Fictions, which, as Lee describes it,

laments 'the lack of critical attention paid to feminist

postmodernist writers. '10 According to Waugh, there are

contemporary women writers producing 'postmodernist' work,

but this work often expresses 'an optimism about the

8 in
George Kearns, 'History and Games, ' Hudson
Review, 42, No. 2 (1989), 335-44 (p. 335).
9
Marguerite Alexander, Flights from Realism:
Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and
American Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), p. 18.
10 Realism Postmodern
Alison Lee, and Power:
British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), preface, p. xi.
Introduction 6

possibility of human relationships and human agency which

is rarely articulated in the "classic" postmodern texts of

writers such as Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme, Sukenick, »ll

This optimism, it appears, may take the form of, or simply

be mistaken for, the sort of 'humanism' which 'classic'

postmodern novelists are continually breaking down. It

seems, therefore, that if women writers have specific

political aims, involving for example, the depiction of a

utopian vision, or the construction (however self-

conscious) of a unified revolutionary force, the very

specificity of these aims earns them a marginalised

position vis-ä-vis the postmodernist movement.

If Angela Carter cannot be assimilated to the

American post-modernists, she does not seem to be quite

British either. Nicci Gerrard writes:

Angela Carter, standing out on the British

literary landscape, can write novels whose
extravagant and exotic surfaces and fabulously
self-conscious theatricality turn away from the
British literary tradition and use 'alb of
Western Europe as a great scrapyard. '

Lorna Sage suggests that Carter has been marginalised by

the literary establishment because her writing often

offends the British sensibility:

Her preoccupations as a writer--deepened and

defined over the years--remain radically at odds
with the puritanism and the conventional realism

11 Patricia Waugh, in Feminine Fictions: Revisitin

the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 169.
12
Nicci Gerrard, in Into the Mainstream: How
Feminism Has Changed Women's Writing (London: Pandora,
1989), p. 161, is quoting Angela Carter, from the interview
with Haffenden, in Novelists, p. 92.
Introduction 7

that characterize much British fiction. (DLB,

p. 212)

Elsewhere she comments: 'Carter's fictions prowl around

on the fringes of the proper English novel like dream-

monsters--nasty, erotic, brilliant creations that feed off

cultural crisis. '13 Ian McEwan describes the mixed

critical reception of Carter's work and explains:

Dominant English literary taste, with its

lingering preferences for fine social detail,
irony, nuances of class and instinctive distrust
of the mythical and magical, has until now
regarded her with some distrust. (Sunday Times
Magazine, 9 September 1984, p. 42)

He also lists the 'peculiar' tendencies of Carter's work

which render it so risky:

The characteristic elements of her fiction mark

her out as a very un-English writer: dreams,
myths, fairy tales, metamorphoses, the unruly
unconscious, epic journeys and a highly sensual
celebration of sexuality in both its most joyous
and darkest manifestations. She writes a prose
that lends itself to magnificent set-pieces of
fastidious sensuality. (Sunday Times Magazine,
9 September 1984, p. 42)

Carter, then, writes provocative fiction which takes

enormous risks, and which, it seems, often gives offence.

Her frequently bizarre, fantastic, and always ironic

fiction engages not only with questions of sexuality, but

also with pornography and sexual violence (which I discuss

in detail in Chapter 4), and with questions of race and

class (although, it seems, not in an acceptably low-key

manner). Her writing cultivates excess, her short texts

always manage to give the impression of being overblown,

13 Lorna Sage, 'The Savage Sideshow, ' in New Review,

39/40 (1977), 51-57 (p. 51).
Introduction 8

her longer ones, especially Nights at the Circus, appear

enormous, and yet each voluptuous sentence is obviously

crafted with care and with relish. John Haffenden

suggests to Carter that she embraces opportunities for

overwriting, and she responds: 'Embrace them? I would

say that I half-suffocate them with the enthusiasm with

which I wrap my arms and legs around them' (Novelists,

p. 91). Hence the kind of vocabulary that sends the reader

in flight to a good dictionary. Jacky Gillott, however,

commenting on Carter's language in The Bloody Chamber,

finds the dictionary unnecessary:

Instead of draping a noun with voluptuous

epithets, she will find one, exquisitely
sensuous 'ciliate' to describe the winter
...
stumps of willow, 'gracile, ' for the muzzles of
fine-bred horses. It barely matters whether one
knows the meaning of the words, they are used
with truly lapidary skill. (The Times, 10
January 1980, p. 9a)

Carter herself offers information about her literary

background to explain her divergence from dominant British

literary taste:

The first writers that I read with excitement

and conviction were Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatists, when I was about fifteen Then we
...
had this very good French teacher, and we did
Les Fleurs du Mal, and Phedre, and the minute I
read Racine, I knew that it moved me much more
savagely than Shakespeare... plus the hint of
Calvinism, the Jansenism. Anyway at this point
I was completely lost to the English tradition.
Anybody who's had a stiff injection of Rimbaud
at eighteen isn't going to be able to cope
terribly well with Philip Larkin, I'm afraid....
Later the surrealists had the same effect.
('The Savage Sideshow, ' p. 54)

No single category seems to accommodate Carter's

work. One way in which her fiction resists

Introduction 9

characterisation is by violating generic norms. She has

been classified, for example, as a writer of Gothic

novels, of horror stories, of science fiction, of fantasy,

and of magic realism. And she uses and transforms all of

these forms for her own purposes, transgressing accepted

literary boundaries and consequently disrupting readers'

expectations.

There are, of course, many contemporary and

experimental writers with whom Carter shares common

ground, but perhaps too many to enable critics to classify

Carter in a stable category. Carter's work shares a self-

conscious recognition of its status as fiction with, for

example, John Fowles's The Magus (1965), John Barth's

Giles Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (1966), Joanna

Russ's The Female Man (1975), David Lodge's How Far Can

You Go (1980), Alisdair Gray's Lanark (1981), Frankie

Finn's Out on the Plain (1984), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's

Parrot (1984), Fay Weldon's Leader of the Band (1988), and

many more. Carter's narrators, especially in The Infernal

Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and Nights at the

Circus (1984), belong to a long line of unreliable

narrators with notable twentieth-century counterparts in

Nabokov's Lolita (1959) and Pale Fire (1962), Salman

Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), 14 Jeanette

and

14 In Novelists Carter explains:

People babble a lot nowadays about the

'unreliable narrator'--as in Salman Rushdie's
Midnight's Children--so I thought: I'll show
Introduction 10

Winterson's The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry

(1989). Carter's habit of experimenting with literary

conventions is shared with several North American male

writers (usually categorised as 'postmodern'); these are

writers who subscribe to a metafictional practice

characterised by an extreme self-consciousness about

language and literary form which often results in a

parodic and excessive style of writing. They explore the

many theoretical implications of fiction and also pose

questions about the relationship between fiction and

reality. Like so much of Carter's fiction, for example,

Robert Coover's short stories, 'The Door, ' 'The Magic

Poker, ' 'The Gingerbread House, ' 'The Brother, ' and 'J's

Marriage, ' in Pricksongs and Descants (1969), involve

rewritings of fairy tales and Biblical stories. Both

Pricksongs and Descants and Coover's novel The Public

Burning (1977) share with Carter's work a self-conscious

conviction that reality is a construction, and all focus

on the notion of appearances. Brian McHale points out

similarities between Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines

and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973); they share, for

example, an interest in Manichaean allegories. This

interest, McHale suggests, may stem from the work of

Kafka, Beckett Joyce. 15 Several Angela Carter's

and of

early novels, in particular The Magic Toyshop (1967),

you a really unreliable narrator in Nights at

the Circus! (p. 90)
15 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York:
Methuen, 1987), p. 142-43.
Introduction 11

Heroes and Villains (1969), and Love (1971) share an

interest in the difficulties of role-playing and of

playing out 'scripts' with, for example, Donald

Barthelme's Snow White (1967), in which a young woman in

the contemporary world has to contend with a code of

expectations from another era. Carter's Heroes and

Villains is also one of many post-apocalyptic dystopias

written in the later part of this century: it has much in

common with, for example, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker

(1980), which also explores the theme of resistance to a

repressive order itself created out of shreds of myths and

traditions from the past. Lorna Sage suggests other

examples:

Two writers she admires, John Hawkes and J. G.

Ballard, are useful reference points for mapping
out her imaginative territory, but she has
written less trash than Ballard, and is a lot
less fey and self-regarding than Hawkes has
become. Like them, though, she writes
aggressively against the grain of puritanism-
cum-naturalism, producing adult fairy tales.
(The Savage Sideshow, p. 51)

It might seem profitable then to interpret Carter's

early literary status alongside that of J. G. Ballard and

Robert Coover, whose fictional experimentation left them

largely neglected by mainstream audiences and relegated

them to a 1960's counter-culture. The importance of such

'eccentric' or 'fringe' writers has been realised and re-

appropriated only in retrospect. Carter, as this thesis

will document (in Chapter 2), found herself half 'in' and

half 'out' of the counter-culture; she was claimed

intermittently by both camps, and yet belonged to neither.

Introduction 12

This may account for some of the difficulties of 'placing'

even her early work in one particular category.

Reviewers and critics are quick to point to the

similarities between Carter's work and that of Latin

American writers, particularly Gabriel Garcia Märquez's

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Jorge Luis

Borges's Labyrinths (1962) (the labyrinth is a favourite

figure throughout Carter's work). Isabel Allende's

novels, The House of Spirits (1985), Of Love and Shadows

(1987) and Eva Luna (1988) might also be included within

this group. Walter Kendrick compares Carter's work to

that of Märquez and notes her partiality for Borges, but

still finds her unplaceable:

Carter's fiction somewhat resembles 'magic

realism, ' but she's got an intellectual
intensity that makes Garcia Marquez look slack
and moonstruck. She herself has named Borges as
her model, though that claim is both egotistical
and self-depreciating. She's never come close
to the glittering perfection of Borges's little
fables, yet her own work is so juicily alive
that his seems arid in its company. There's no
one, in fact, enough like Carter to make
comparison worthwhile--no real person, anyhow.
To find her equal, you'd have to flee into
fantasy: Mother Goose in bondage drag, perhaps.
(Village Voice Literary Supplement, October
1986, pp. 17-19 (p. 19) )

Criticism has been levelled at those Latin American

writers who choose to portray their deeply divided and

warring countries through the medium of magic realism. To

some critics this approach appears to evade direct

political confrontation, and therefore avoid

responsibility by not simply stating that they are writing

about countries in which it is intolerable to live.

Introduction 13

Carter has been criticised in an oddly similar way for

avoiding direct feminist disputes and 'enclosing' her

political agenda 'safely' within fantasy worlds which

appear to have little bearing on contemporary life. Her

writing, it appears, is too direct on the one hand and not

direct enough on the other. It is her feminist concerns

which exclude her from the 'postmodernist' camp, and yet

it is some of her more 'postmodernist' techniques,

including some of the excursions into fantasy, which, for

some critics, blunt the effectiveness of her political

explorations. Perhaps, in the end, contexts condition

actual responses. Witness the case of Salman Rushdie,

who, also using deliberate exaggerations and superimposing

the supernatural upon seemingly more concrete and

historically grounded elements in order to portray extreme

political situations in the Indian subcontinent, has

caused a terrible political furore with his 1988 novel The

Satanic Verses. This 'indirect' mode of writing has

lately proved appealling to other feminist writers. Doris

Lessing (in the Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence (1979

to 1983)) and Margaret Atwood (in The Handmaid's Tale

(1985)) have come relatively recently to science fiction

and fantasy in order to explore the feminist dilemma,

while Carter chose to do so much earlier. Carter has, of

course, since shown a movement towards what might be

described as more historically situated fiction (though

elements of fantasy are never absent).

Introduction 14

Angela Carter's tendency toward what is often

described as 'magic realism' is shared by some British

women writers of her own and of the next generation such

as Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant and Jeanette Winterson.

Carter's fiction, however, is more excessive and

experimental than Weldon's, and whilst Tennant and Carter

both produce beautifully crafted writing and share a

fascination with intertextuality, Carter is far more

16 Winterson's Carter's
expansive and affirmative. and

work, however, has much more in common, as Nicci Gerrard

recognises:

Angela Carter is a rather lonely figure on

...
the landscape, though approaching her are
younger writers such as the audacious Jeanette
Winterson. (Into the Mainstream, p. 13)

It is likely that Winterson, who began publishing fiction

in 1985, was brought up on a diet of, amongst other

things, Angela Carter's work. Similarities in their

fiction, however, may also be explained in terms of

shifting fashions, which Angela Carter has often managed

her 17
to anticipate, sometimes to own cost.

16
The title latest Sisters
of Emma Tennant's novel,
and Strangers (Grafton, 1990), recalls the North American
title of Carter's collection of short stories, Saints and
Strangers (published in Britain as Black Venus).
Tennant's title might also be read as a description of the
similar political aims but radically different styles of
the two authors.
17
The booklet Carter has written introducing a
collection of postcards of Frida Kahlo's work, for
example, was published in 1989, just two years before a
sudden surge of interest in the artist. Unfortunately,
Carter's contribution was already out of print and
unavailable by the time interest reached its peak in 1991.
Introduction 15

Carter's later work might also be compared with the

large-scale parodic novels of Joyce Carol Oates, which

include Bellefleur (1980), The Bloodsmoor Romance (1982),

and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). All three of these

novels involve the disturbing combination of natural and

supernatural, and a wealth of bizzare and grotesque

imagery. More important, however, are the similarities

between both Carter's and Oates's apparent fascination

with scenes of violence, particularly of rape. Oates's

morbid obsession with many types of violence has been much

written about, whilst critics of violence in Carter's work

are more concerned with the seemingly gratuitous

pornographic elements of her writing (this is documented

in Chapter 4).

Gerrard lists women writers from around the world who

display the ability to experiment with and challenge

existing conventions--including, perhaps, conventional

definitions of what constitutes 'feminist' writing--while

remaining, she claims, in the powerful position of being

18
popular writers who reach a large and varied audience:

Angela Carter Jeanette Winterson Toni

... ...
Morrison, Louise Erdrich and Gloria Naylor
...
Isabel Allende Nadine Gordimer Margaret
... ...
Atwood Keri Hulme and Janet Frame They
... ...
treat the world as their stage and language as a

18 by
Allof the writers are now published
mainstream presses, since feminist presses like virago and
The Women's Press have been accepted as 'mainstream. '
Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and perhaps we should add
Alice Walker to Gerrard's list, are now regularly set as
required reading for English literature degrees. However,
most of the writers listed reach only a minority
'intellectual' audience.
Introduction 16

powerful instrument. They feel free to loot the

literary past--and moreover most of them write
fiction as women writers.
These are the writers who are truly
entering the mainstream of literature and
culture. Instead of inheriting a confined and
stereotypic 'woman's world', they choose to
treat the whole world as their own. By their
bold and deliberate choice, they are not
deserting feminism but are dramatically
liberating the meaning of the 'feminist
novel'--seeking to give it the implication of
mainstream radicalism rather than fringe
conservatism. (Into the Mainstream, pp. 167-68)

Gerrard also suggests how the publishing houses themselves

are redefining what constitutes a 'feminist' book (p. 25).

Carter's The Passion of New Eve (1977) and French feminist

Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres (1969) share many

characteristics: both novels, for instance, are

structured around feminist revisions of Biblical

narrative. Carter's work, however, is not separatist-

oriented. Carter also shares more than feminist interests

with contemporary black American women writers such as

Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, whose narrative

inventiveness and fascination with the supernatural are

comparable with Carter's. The size and scope of

Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Naylor's Mama Day (1988)

also match up to Carter's expansive Nights at the Circus.

Like Carter's heroine, Fevvers, many of the women

portrayed in Beloved and Mama Day display extraordinary

strength and disruptive power.

Central to this thesis is a recognition of the

challenge Carter's work poses to an important genre

Introduction
17

distinction: that between fiction theory. 19 In this

and

respect her fiction joins a tradition of feminist

experimental writing, from Virginia Woolf's The

Pargiters20 to the work of French feminists such as Helene

Cixous 21 to break down the

and Luce Irigaray, who seek

barrier between politically engaged feminist discourse and

a more literary discourse. Carter's work, however, does

not place the two distinct discourses in juxtaposition, as

Woolf's does, where one interrupts, in order to disrupt,

the other; nor does she, like some writers of what has

become known as 'ecriture feminine, ' refuse any single

19
For the purposes this argument I am subsuming
of
literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism
and philosophy under the one heading, 'theory. '
20 in 'Protesting Too Much: Feminist
Mary Nyquist,
Discourse Under Pressure, ' in Popular Feminist Papers,
No. 8 (Toronto: Centre for Women's Studies, 1987), writes:

Woolf is deeply conflicted in her attitudes

toward the difference between 'fact' and
'fiction' She planned to create a new form,
... interleave
the 'Novel-essay, ' which would
fictional chapters with prose commentaries
providing feminist critique. The new form
foundered, however, splitting itself apart to
become, eventually, on the one hand The Years, a
novel, and on the other Three Guineas, a
feminist tract....

A draft of the feminist commentary Woolf

version
wrote before giving up on her experimental
'Novel-essay' has recently been published as The
Pargiters. (pp. 13-14)
21 of Helene
the Cixous's and
In the exchange at end
Born Woman, translated by
Catherine Clement's The Newly
Betty Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), Clement describes Cixous's writing as 'halfway
between theory fiction' (p. 136). Much of Luce
and
Irigaray's this quality: see, for example,
writing shares
Speculum translated by Gillian C. Gill
of the Other Woman,
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Introduction 18

mode of discourse by interspersing essay, fiction, poetry

22 Rather,
and autobiography. she adopts a self-conscious

fictional discourse, or metafictional discourse, which the

reader is invited to interpret as both fiction and also as

fiction fiction. 23 In
about a review of Nights at the

Circus for American Book Review Richard Martin writes:

It is clear that Angela Carter is no stranger to

such postmodern quirks as the 'self-reflexive
novel' or the long ongoing love-affair with
books about the writing of fiction. (May 1986,
pp. 12-13 (p. 12))

And, in an interview in Women's Review, soon after the

publication of Black Venus, Anne Smith reports that Carter

describes 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe' as 'a kind of

22 description is the longer

One exception to this
version of Carters' short story, 'Ashputtle: or, the
Mother's Ghost, ' published recently in the Village Voice
Literary Supplement, March 1990, pp. 22-23. Carter has
published a shorter version in The Virago Book of Ghost
Stories, edited by Richard Dalby (London: Virago, 1990),
pp. 324-25. The longer version takes the form of three
different accounts of the Cinderella fairy tale. Unlike
fiction, the first half of the first
any of Carter's other
'Ashputtle' (and the first section accounts for
section of
three-quarters length the 'story') is
of the of whole
in discourse, through which the fictional
written critical
plot gradually emerges. This half section assumes a
knowledge fairy tale; it discusses the
of the original
writing of the story, the roles of various characters
(especially figures), the limitations of the fairy
mother
tale mode, 'plot devices. ' At the half-way
and certain
the fictional takes over, this
point of this section mode
time by critical asides. The second and third
punctuated
sections of 'Ashputtle' are both primarily fictional, much
like her fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber.
more rewritten
23 in Narcissistic Narrative: The
Linda Hutcheon,
Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1984), defines
'metafiction' fiction--that is, fiction
as 'fiction about
that includes within itself a commentary on its own
narrative and/or linguistic identity' (p. 1).
Introduction 19

literary criticism: literary criticism as fiction,

really. '24

Carter's self-conscious fiction also conforms to the

more complex definition of 'metafiction' put forward by

Patricia Waugh:

In providing a critique of their own methods of

construction, [metafictional] writings not only
examine the fundamental structures of narrative
fiction, they also explore the possible
fictionality of2the world outside the literary
fictional text. 5

I hope to show that Carter's work not only comments

narcissistically upon its own fictional processes, and

upon other fiction, but also speculates about the very

nature of fiction itself, and challenges conventions which

govern the way we interpret not only fiction but also

ourselves and the world. As Lorna Sage has said: 'If she

is now one of those writers whom we trust to read back our

culture's meaning to us, it is in part because she has

explored its dark corners and dead ends with such

daring. '26 In the interview with John Haffenden, Carter

describes her fiction in discursive terms. Haffenden

24 'Myths the Erotic, ' in Women's

Anne Smith, and
Review, 1 (November 1985), 28-29 (p. 29). Similarly, in
the interview John Haffenden, Carter explains: 'My
with
fiction is very often a kind of literary criticism, which
is something I've started to worry about quite a lot'
(p. 79). In the same interview Carter also says, however,
'Books about books is fun but frivolous' (p. 79).

25 The Theory and

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction:
Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen,
1984), p. 2.
26 Lorna Sage, 'Mirror images, ' a review of the 1987
editions of Love and Fireworks, in the Guardian, 22 May
1987.
Introduction 20

comments: 'You've written that exploring ideas is for you

the same thing as telling stories: "a is
narrative an

argument stated in fictional terms. "' Carter replies:

'Sometimes they are straightforwardly intellectual

arguments. The female penitentiary at the end of Nights

at the Circus is where I discuss crime and punishment as

ideas' (Novelists, 27
p. 79). This confusion of genres

often makes it possible to refer to Angela Carter's

fictions as if they were theoretical texts--fiction as

28
philosophy or criticism. Elaine Jordan, for example,

describes them as 'a series of essays: attempts, trials,

27
This section is also a dramatisation of Jeremy
Bentham's model of the Panopticon, made famous by Michel
Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 'The major effect
of the Panopticon, ' writes Foucault, was 'to induce in the
inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power' (p. 201).

28 Carter has more in common with Clarice

perhaps
Lispector, of whom the translator, Ronald W. Sousa, in his
introduction to The Passion according to G. H.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
writes:

The fact that the Ukraine-born Clarice Lispector

(1924-1977) became a literary cause-celebre in
her adopted Brazil but is viewed in France,
because of the very same texts, as an important
contemporary philosopher dealing with the
relationships between language and human
(especially female) subjecthood says much about
the genre problematic. Are we to take G. H. 's
story as fiction or a speculation on
philosophical problems in and through the
narration of what we would traditionally call a
'plot'? Where does literature end and
philosophy begin? (pp. vii-viii)
Introduction 21

processes. '29 Some reviewers, not surprisingly, find the

fiction/theory mixture disturbing:

Excellent as the writing of the title story

['Black Venus'] undoubtedly is, the same being
true of The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe, both
stories strike me as extreme forms of
imaginative literary history and criticism more
than they impress me as stories. (Douglas Dunn,
Glasgow Herald, 12 October 1985)

It is readily accepted that theory contributes to

fiction, and it has been argued that both the production

and reception of Angela Carter's work has been, and

continues to be, shaped by contemporary critical theory.

Carter attended Bristol University, and also began her

publishing career, in the mid-sixties, when the impact of

'Structuralist' theory was beginning to be felt in British

literary institutions. F. R. Leavis's influence and that

of the New Critics was still dominant in English

Departments, but the early works of Roland Barthes

(particularly Mythologies (1957) and Elements of Semiology

(1964)), Claude Levi-Strauss (The Savage Mind (1962),

Tristes Tropiques (1955) and The Raw and The Cooked

(1964)), and Michel Foucault (The Order of Things: An

Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966)) were also being

30 Russian Formalism also coming into

published. was

29
Elaine Jordan, 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's
Speculative Fictions, ' in Plotting Change: Contemporary
Women's Fiction, edited by Linda Anderson (London: Edward
Arnold, 1990), p. 27.
30The dates for quoted in this
given publications
paragraph refer to their first publication in French, and
not to subsequent translations. For details of
translations, see Bibliography 3.
Introduction 22

fashion, as the work of, for example, Roman Jakobson and

Vladimir Propp became available in translation. Angela

Carter's publications up to and including Love not only

reflect 1960's theoretical thinking, but also reveal the

pressure of this decade's cultural and political

movements. Therefore, although Carter keeps abreast of

cultural developments, it is worth remembering that she is

also prosecuting an ongoing debate with the intellectual

and social fashions of her youth. Her continuing pre-

occupation with fairy-tale (now picked up by a number of

feminist writers31) seems likely to have been established

during her university reading in the theory and practice

of medieval literature. This again links her with the

European traditions she defines in the Haffenden

interview.

Many critics note how Carter's work continues to

interact with current theoretical investigation. Rory P.

B. Turner, Kari E. Lokke, Kate Holden, and Paulina Palmer

describe the influence of Bakhtin's notion of the

32 Salman
grotesque and carnivalesque upon Carter's work.

31 See, for Sara Maitland's Telling Tales:

example,
Short Stories (London: Journeyman Press, 1983) and A Book
of Spells (London: Methuen, 1983), and Emma Tennant's
most recent novel Sister's and Strangers (London:
Grafton, 1990)
.
32 'Subjects and Symbols:
Rory P. B. Turner,
Transformations Identity in Nights at the Circus, ' in
of
Folklore Forum, 20, Nos. l/2 (1987), 39-60; Kari E. Lokke,
'Bluebeard Chamber: The Grotesque of Self-
and The Bloody
Parody and Self-Assertion, ' in Frontiers: A Journal of
Women's Studies, 10, No. 1 (1988), 7-12; Kate Holden,
'Women's Writing and the Carnivalesque, ' in Literature
Teaching Politics (henceforth referred to as LTP), 4
Introduction 23

Rushdie invokes Carter's name in his attempt to define the

term 'carnivalesque' in a recent review of Robert Coover's

latest novel, Pinocchio in Venice:

Much of the best writing of the past 30 years

can be described, using a term coined by the
Russian critic Bakhtin, as carnivalesque.
Carnivalesque literature (the novels of Thomas
Pynchon and Angela Carter, of Günter Grass and
Julio Cortazar) is a turbulent, whirligig
writing, a response to a shifting unreliable
reality. (Independent On Sunday, 28 April 1991,
p. 30)

And Carolyn Brown, in her PhD thesis 'Theoretical

Fictions, ' combines a study of Bakhtin's work and Carter's

fiction to elaborate her primarily theoretical exploration

of discourses of power and desire. 33 Patricia Waugh cites

Angela Carter as an example of the increasing number of

women writers whose work has 'been influenced by post-

structuralist theory and postmodernist experiment'

(Feminine Fictions, p. 30). Paulina Palmer claims:

Motifs and passages of symbolic narrative

relating to psychoanalytic materials are a
constant factor in her writing. They link it to
the topic of the re-evaluation of psychoanalytic
theory, one which occupies a central, though
contentious place, on the current feminist
agenda.. 34

33 Carolyn Brown, 'Theoretical Fictions, ' Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, University
of Birmingham, 1985.

34 Paulina Palmer, 'From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird

Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight, ' in Women Reading
Women's Writing, edited by Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester,
1987), pp. 177-205 (p. 181).
Introduction 24

And, in Derrida, Christopher Norris breaks off in the

middle of a discussion of Jacques Derrida's 'The Double

Session' to illustrate his argument with passages from

Nights at the Circus. 'I would guess, ' he writes, 'that

Carter has read "The Double Session" and read it, what is

more, with a keen sense of its fictional possibilities. '35

Norris, however, also writes:

I have no wish to press too hard on what may

be--as conventional wisdom would have it--a
fortuitous coincidence of 'themes'. But these
passages from Nights at the Circus [regarding
the invention of Buffo the clown's face] do
catch precisely the logic and the effects of
that 'dissimulating' movement that Derrida finds
at work in Mallarme's cryptic text. (Derrida,
p. 52)

What I wish to suggest in this thesis is not only

that Angela Carter's fiction may be informed by various

types of literary and psychoanalytic theory, but that her

fiction also makes a contribution to theoretical thought.

It is precisely because Carter does not juxtapose two

distinct discourses, theoretical and fictional, but adopts

one--fictional--to enact issues raised by the

she is able to challenge the very

other--theoretical--that
36 That is, it is precisely what
distinction between them.

35
Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 51.

36 Much of Carter's explores and disrupts

writing
thresholds or borderlines between one state and another;
Chapter 2 discusses Carter's challenge to the
Many of her stories involve
fiction/history distinction.
heroines have to make the shift between
adolescent who
important events often take place
childhood and adulthood;
the time the solstice; and Nights
at of winter or summer
at the Circus is set at the turn of the century.
Introduction 25

Robert Young has called the 'conjugation, doubling or

duplicity'37 of fiction and theory, which, in Carter's

writing, challenges accepted definitions of either

discourse.

What, then, can a fictional mode of writing

accomplish that a more purely theoretical discourse

cannot? Fiction can dramatise, and in doing so, question

particular theoretical issues. Rita Felski argues this

for feminist fiction more widely:

If literary theory can be used to illuminate

contemporary feminist writing, it is also the
case that aspects of women's current literary
practices can be drawn upon to problematize the
more abstract an 58 speculative claims of feminist
literary theory.

To 'problematize' necessarily suggests involvement:

Carter's fiction, therefore, by enacting or embodying what

37 'Post-Structuralism: The End of

Robert Young,
Theory, ' in the Oxford Literary Review, 5, Nos. 1/2
(1982), 9. Young is using Roland Barthes's 'Theory of the
Text' (published in Young's Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1981), pp. 31-47), in order to offer a definition of 'post-
structuralism' as that which marks the 'end of theory. '
He argues the redundancy of metatextual commentary when
all language can be read as what Barthes calls 'text. ' In
'From Work to Text, ' in Image-Music-Text, translated by
Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977) pp. 155-64, Barthes
writes:

The discourse on the Text should itself be

nothing other than text, research, textual
activity, since the Text is that social space
which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any
subject of the enunciation in position as judge,
master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory
of the Text can coincide only with a practice of
writing. (p. 164)
38 Felski, Aesthetics:
Rita Beyond Feminist
Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson
Radius, 1989), p. l.
Introduction 26

in theory must remain 'abstract' or 'speculative, ' gains

entry into particular theoretical debates. Carter's

writing engages with many current crucial political and

literary issues, as Elaine Jordan makes clear:

Angela Carter writes from the thick of Marxism's

self-critique in the light of both twentieth-
century experience, and psychoanalysis: there
is hardly a theoretical debate of the past
twenty years that she does not subject to
imaginative exploration. ('Enthralment, ' p. 34)

And Ann Snitow, in a recent interview with Carter, has

referred to her fictions as battlegrounds:

What makes Carter great--and great she is, as

it's time U. S. readers discovered--is that she
wears her mantle of style, and her silver sword
curiously wrought with signs and figures, into
the thickest of modern battles. (Village Voice
Literary Supplement, June 1989, p. 14)

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which

Carter's fiction thematises, exposes, and challenges, the

reading conventions which govern the reader/text

relationship, narrative centres, intertextual origins, and

notions of character, identity, gender, and meaning. Each

chapter also shows how Carter's texts anticipate readers'

responses and include their own fictional procedures among

the objects they describe. Reading conventions, Carter's

only the text but also the

work suggests, construct not

reader; and in this way Carter's work challenges the way

we see our own position as readers.

The thesis both begins and ends with a chapter on

Nights the Circus. Many critics have identified this

at

for Carter would at last

as a break-through novel which
Introduction 27

generate the recognition that her writing so clearly

deserves. For example, Ian McEwan's profile of Carter in

the Sunday Times Magazine, just prior to the publication

of Nights at the Circus, claims:

The publication this month of her novel Nights

at the Circus will certainly confirm her as
stylist and fantasist, but will also force
recognition of an impressive development in the
writer's career; in scale, in characterisation,
in its narrative momentum and the sheer pleasure
of its language, Angela Carter has brought her
work to a new height. (9 September 1984, p. 42)

(The very existence of this profile in The Sunday Times is

evidence of the projected success of Carter's novel. )

Others have claimed that Nights at the Circus marks the

beginning of her standing as a 'mainstream' writer (though

the release of the Neil Jordan/Angela Carter film The

Company of Wolves in the same year also did much to bring

Carter's name into public awareness). Nicci Gerrard cites

the novel as a significant example of work by a

feminist which has intervened in, and

contemporary writer

been incorporated into, 'mainstream literature':

Nights at the Circus succeeds in

... it
transforming fictional forms, and stands
clear of the blinkered contemporaneity that
limits novels. Moreover, it has
many modern
reached a larger audience than is traditionally
for 'feminist' novels. (Into the
expected
Mainstream, p. 167)

Nights at the Circus was predated by seven extraordinary

novels (several of them award-winning), two collections of

two of non-fiction. However,

short stories, and volumes

John Haffenden to Carter soon after the

as suggests

Nights the Circus, this earlier work is

publication of at
Introduction 28

often dismissed or ignored. Carter agrees, identifying a

particular example:

Robert Nye's review in The Guardian was very

nice. but grudging, I think; he seemed rather
. .
reluctant to concede that there had ever been
anything more than a lot of high-falutin bluster
in my earlier work. (Novelists, p. 81)

Like the critics cited above, I regard Nights at the

Circus as a significant new starting point for Carter's

work, but perhaps for different reasons. I began work on

this thesis soon after the publication of Nights at the

Circus, and it was my reading of this novel which inspired

the project; it also encouraged me to explore all of

Carter's earlier work, much of which I found equally

challenging and rewarding. This thesis is primarily

concerned with Carter's novels, although I shall also make

use of relevant short stories, and some of her non-

fiction, both of which explore complementary issues. Two

of Carter's earliest, and now out-of-print, novels, Shadow

Dance Several Perceptions, I deal with only briefly;

and

they belong to a different, more naturalistic mode of

39 they interesting first

writing, and although make

kind I shall describe, it

attempts at the of experiments

is in the later that the may best be

novels experiments

examined.

39 In Novelists, Carter claims:

The first novel I wrote, Shadow Dance, was about

of the city in which I
a perfectly real area
lived. It didn't give exactly mimetic copies of
I knew, but it was absolutely as real as
people in
the milieu I was familiar with: it was set
provincial bohemia. (p. 80)
Introduction 29

Carter's fictions can be seen as a series of

experiments. They can also be seen as a continuous and

evolving process: each novel builds upon or reinterprets

the experiments taking place in the earlier fiction (and

include the here too). 40 Many

we could short stories of

Carter's earlier experiments come to fruition in Nights at

the Circus, which is why this particular novel is so

important. I do not wish to suggest, however, that the

ongoing experiments throughout her work come to any

ultimate conclusion in Nights at the Circus. Rather, I

would claim that each volume Carter has published

functions both as a conclusion and a new beginning: each

offers answers to some questions but they are answers

which generate still more questions. Hence the many

apparent resolutions in Nights at the Circus serve only to

present more problems and open up new possibilities (just

as The Minister's attempts to contain Dr Hoffman's

in The Infernal Desire Machines only serve to

apparitions

generate complex breed of illusion (pp. 22-23)).

a more

Harriet Gilbert, in her of Nights at the Circus for

review

The New Statesman, registers the effect of all these

questions as a compulsion to read and reread the novel:

Change is what the book is about: centrally,

the changes confronted and engineered by Modern
Woman; more widely, change as a terrible,
beautiful, self-perpetuating force. For this
the book cannot end: other novels have
reason,

40There therefore, many recurrent (they might

are,
even be termed 'obsessive') motifs which crop up again and
across all of Carter's fiction. I will document
again
some of these motifs as they emerge in my analyses.
Introduction 30

refrained from providing an answer'; Carter's

would have to be eternal to put all its
questions This reader put her hangover off
...
by taking a hair of the dog that bit her by
starting all over again. (28 September 1984,
pp. 30-31 (p. 30) )

The thesis is structured in a sort of sonata form,

where Chapter 1, a reading of Nights at the Circus, acts

as the exposition; Chapters 2 to 5, a long development

section, explore the experiments carried out in Carter's

earlier fiction which, I believe, prepare the way for her

latest novel; and finally Chapter 6 marks a return to the

exposition material--'the hair of the dog that bit'--and

reinterprets Nights at the Circus in the light of the

intervening chapters. Each chapter explores a different

issue, and in each case I have chosen the novel or novels

most overtly concerned with the specific issue in order to

demonstrate what is often a common feature across her

fiction. At the same time, however, several chapters

(particularly, 3,5 and 6) do consider changes in Carter's

work over time.

Chapter 1 engages with both Nights at the Circus and

reviews of Carter's work in order to establish the sort of

reader/text which her fiction demands. This

relationships

chapter begins to describe two issues which I believe are

crucial to Carter's work, and which are central to my

thesis: the importance doubleness and paradox, and the

of

in Carter's self-consciously dramatises

ways which writing

problems of interpretation. The second chapter once again

it examines inter-
engages with a particular novel:

textuality in The Infernal Desire Machines. With the aid

Introduction 31

of Derrida's model of invagination, I exploit this feature

of Carter's work to demonstrate how it puts into question

the traditional distinction between centre and margins.

The chapter will examine what is central and marginal in

The Infernal Desire Machines, and show how the novel

reflects Carter's own central yet marginal position within

the literary establishment. Once again, this chapter

exhibits the self-conscious interest of Carter's fiction

in matters of interpretation; it also points towards some

of the liberating qualities associated with Carter's

writing and begins to raise some of the gender i9sues

which dominate the last three chapters of the thesis.

Chapters 3 and 4 show how Carter's fiction exposes and

challenges the reading conventions which govern the way we

read character, identity, and gender. Chapter 3 shows how

four novels, The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love,

and The Passion of New Eve, promote a 'realist' mode of

reading character whilst continually reminding the reader

that character is a construction, in order to demonstrate

the power of the conventions which create the illusion of

knowable individuals both within and outside fiction.

Chapter 4 shows how The Passion foregrounds a central

feminist question, 'What is a Woman? ' This chapter

examines the ways in which Carter utilises gender

stereotypes particularly those used to define the female

body, in order to debunk them. It also contains an

account of the debate about pornography which Carter's

work has excited amongst critics. Chapters 5 and 6 look

Introduction 32

at the New Eve figures which recur throughout Carter's

work, and explore the affirmative politics which sustain,

and the positive experience of reading, her fiction.

Chapter 5 asks the question, 'What constitutes a liberated

female subject? ' while Chapter 6, returning to Nights at

the Circus, celebrates Fevvers as just such a figure.

Each chapter attempts to illumiate, from a variety of

perspectives, the potentially liberating 'reading space'

which Carter's work opens up.

The second reading of Nights at the Circus in Chapter

6 enacts the process of change produced by the intervening

chapters. I do not wish to suggest, of course, that this

second reading is a definitive reading; rather, it engages

with just some of the challenges to which a reader of

Carter's work is exposed. The structure of the thesis

reproduces my own experience of Carter's work, which

having begun with her latest novel, took a detour via her

earlier work and returned to Nights at the Circus. It

might also almost be said to imitate Carter's own writing

of her last novel which, according to Ian McEwan, began to

take ten before finally appearing in

shape some years

print in 1984 (Sunday Times Magazine, 9 September 1984,

interim, Carter published The

p. 44). In the wrote and

Passion New Eve, The Sadeian Woman, and The Bloody

of

Chamber, together her collection of journalism

and put

Nothing Sacred. McEwan Carter as saying, 'I had to

quotes

wait till I was big enough, strong enough, to write about

(Sunday Times Magazine, 9 September 1984,

a winged woman'
Introduction 33

p. 44), which suggests that the intervening years and their

fictional experimentation were necessary for

preparations
the questions which produce and animate Nights the
at
Circus. 41

41
In her article, 'Notes from the Front Line, '
published in On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene
Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), pp. 69-77, Carter writes:

My work has changed a good deal in the last ten

or fifteen years and, for me, growing into
...
feminism was part of the process of maturing.
But when I look at the novels I wrote in my
twenties, when I was a girl, I don't see a
difference in the content, or even in
emotional
the basic themes; I recognise myself, asking
questions, sometimes finding different answers
than I would do now. (p. 69)
 CHAPTER ONE

'NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS': REPORTING, REVIEWING, READING

Ainsi, pour le lecteur, tout est ä faire et tout

est dejä fait.

Jean-Paul Sartrel

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la litterature?

(Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 58.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 35

It can be argued that a reader, in the activity of

interpreting a text, is in control of that text--reading

into it and getting out of it whatever that reader wants

to find. But the same argument can always be inverted to

suggest textual control on the grounds that it is the text

which provokes the reader's responses. The above argument

suggests a reversible condition of reading that is always

the same for all texts. Some texts, however, particularly

many contemporary experimental novels, often labelled

'postmodern, ' exhibit a self-conscious awareness of the

problems of interpretation. Some also anticipate a

variety of reading responses, and in doing so, question

accepted reading conventions. Angela Carter's fiction

attempts to demystify a whole range of such conventions by

exposing as cultural constructs what are often considered

to be essential conditions of reading. Where Carter's

writing differs from that of many other 'postmodernist'

writers, I shall argue, is in the way it not only subverts

reading conventions but simultaneously re-evaluates and

dramatises their indispensability. I begin the thesis

with a consideration of Carter's latest novel, Nights at

the Circus (1984), because, of all of Carter's fiction,

this novel is perhaps the one most explicitly concerned

the issue the control of/surrender to a

with of readers'

text, and because of the challenge to reading conventions

which this implies. All of Carter's novels are concerned,

to varying degrees, with comprehending their own

criticism, but Nights the Circus, it can be argued,

at
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 36

also exploits the reading conventions it examines in order

to orchestrate its own critical reception. Nights at the

Circus also dramatises the very process whereby a reader

may be seduced by a text and potentially changed by this

experience. The argument in this chapter, regarding the

unstable and reversible reader/text relationship which

Nights at the Circus dramatises and exploits so overtly,

forms the foundation upon which my thesis is constructed;

each of the chapters which follow explores different

issues and different novels, but all are specifically

concerned with the power struggle between reader and text.

This chapter will be divided into five sections.

Section I establishes the credentials of a reading figure

within the text: this character is Walser, a reporter,

whose job it is to watch, interpret, and write down what

he sees. The section shows how the opening of Nights at

the Circus portrays Walser as a detached reader who

appears in control of his story--his text--but who, as the

novel progresses, and as his text gradually takes over,

loses this command and his secure perspective. Section II

looks again at Walser, but this time shows how the novel

simultaneously encourages an alternative reading of him,

this time as a man who is, from the beginning of the

novel, to domination and manipulation by his

vulnerable

text. By following the fate of a character who appears to

occupy the place of the reader in Nights at the Circus we

can see how the novel self-consciously dramatises an

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 37

important power struggle between the two contradictory

readings.

Sections III and IV of this chapter imitate the

pattern of the first two sections, with a selection of

reviewers in the place of Walser, and the novel itself in

the place of Walser's story. The reviewers here represent

a notional--hypothetical and multiple--reader, since they

read and interpret the novel precisely in order to imagine

what 'a reader' (obviously, often very different kinds of

reader) might feel and understand. Where Walser

represents a reader within the world of the novel, the

reviewers represent a notional reader outside the novel.

The fictional reporter and 'factual' reviewers, however,

have much in common, since both are professional readers

whose jobs involve the interpretation and reporting of a

particular 'story' to a wider readership. Walser's 'text'

is the sensational and mysterious life of Fevvers, a world

famous aerialiste and apparently winged woman who claims

to have been 'hatched' like a bird from an egg. The

reviewers' text is, of course, Nights at the Circus, which

contains Walser and his story; hence the relationship

between Walser and the reviewers is not a simple allegory.

It is by the fact that the reviewers also have

complicated

Walser, fragments of the narrative to which

and many other

Walser is not a party, to interpret. The reviewers

into those try to a distance from,

polarise who maintain

in to master contain the novel, and those who

order and

relinquish control and celebrate the intoxicating

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewin g, Readin 38
g

experience of journeying through it. These sections also

suggest how the novel superimposes the apparently

incompatible modes of reading which have been posited,

explored and criticised earlier in the novel. Section V

considers the very end of the novel; it describes both

Fevvers's and the novel's dependence upon their respective

audiences, and shows how Nights at the Circus dramatises a

re-evaluation of a mode of reading where the reader

commands the text. It concludes by suggesting how the

novel has not only anticipated its own critical reception

but has also orchestrated a sales-boosting publicity

stunt.

Nights at the Circus is divided into three parts

according to topography: the three different locations

are London, St Petersburg and Siberia. Interestingly,

each part of the novel is roughly equal in length, and

there is a definite turning point at the centre of Chapter

six of the St Petersburg portion, the very heart of the

novel. In the London section of the novel we are

introduced to Fevvers--'"Cockney Venus, "' apparently

winged woman, and 'the most famous aerialiste' (p. 7) of

the turn the The first section is set in

of century.

Fevvers's dressing room after a show, where with help from

her foster mother Lizzie, Fevvers is recounting the story

of her life to Walser, a sceptical American journalist.

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 39

Before Fevvers's story gets properly underway, however,

the narrative jumps back to an earlier point during the

same evening to describe Walser's experience of Fevvers's

trapeze act in which she appears to be performing at an

impossibly slow pace but never quite defies the laws of

gravity. Back in the dressing room, Fevvers's story tells

how Lizzie adopted the foundling Fevvers after finding her

abandoned outside a Whitechapel brothel in a basket full

of broken shells and straw. It tells of her upbringing in

a family of suffragette whores, the sprouting, at puberty,

of a pair of wings, and her first attempts at flight.

Walser hears about the destruction of the brothel upon Ma

death, 2 Fevvers's Lizzie's

Nelson's, the Madame's, and and

descent into poverty along with Lizzie's revolutionary,

Italian, ice-cream-making family; he also hears about

Fevvers's subsequent incarceration and escape from Madame

Schreck's famous house of freaks. Fevvers tells how she

escaped from Madame Schreck's, only to be trapped once

this time by Christian Rosencreutz, who wishes to

more,

her in to attain eternal youth; she then

sacrifice order

describes her from his Gothic mansion and her

escape

journey back to London. In the course of the interview

Fevvers attempts to seduce Walser both narratively and

in is fascinated by her and her

sexually, and he, turn,

story; he attempts, although not altogether successfully,

2 female 'Nelson' in Shadow Dance:

Another appears
identifies the is to become his favourite
Morris woman who
cafe waitress by this name (p. 62).
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 40

to remain detached, sober and sceptical as the two women

ply him with champagne and confuse him by playing tricks

with the clocks. In the second part of the novel Walser

joins Colonel Kearney's circus as a clown in order to

polish up his sense of wonder and follow Fevvers on the

Grand Imperial Tour. The tour starts in St Petersburg

and, in the third and final part of the novel, moves on,

by train, to Siberia. 3

Nights at the Circus encourages the reader to relate

to Walser as a fellow reader or a guide through the text.

But what sort of reader does he represent? He is

portrayed as a detached observer who is in control of

himself and his story. When he interviews Fevvers after

her performance, for example, her dressing room is

described as 'a mistresspiece of exquisitely feminine

squalor, sufficient, in its homely way, to intimidate a

young man who had led a less sheltered life than this one'

(p. 9). We are also informed that:

He filed copy to a New York newspaper for a

living, so he could travel wherever he pleased
the privileged irresponsibility
whilst retaining
journalist, the necessity to
of the professional
see all and believe nothing His avocation
... he
suited him right down to the ground on which
took to keep his feet. (pp. 9-10)
good care

Walser interpretation which aims to

represents a mode of

decipher 'truth, ' and master the text. He

grasp meaning,

3I that this summary inadequate is

am aware short
it point. It is
but also that may be a useful reference
one of the aims of this chapter, and a recurring motif
throughout the thesis--Chapter 2 in particular--to show
that Carter's fiction is resistant to
particularly
summary.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 41

is a professional reporter, confident in his assumptions

about reality and deception, and is careful to keep the

object of his reporting in clear perspective. His

'reports, ' then, serve as summaries which grasp the

essence of some experience or event. He obviously

delights in uncovering deception, 'since he was a good

reporter, he was necessarily a connoisseur of the tall

tale' (p. 11); but his profession depends on his 'habitual

disengagement' (p. 10) from the object of his study in

order to disclose the facts--the 'truth'--to his reading

public. The truth he wants to uncover here, of course, is

whether or not Fevvers's wings are real; and this, for

Walser, is a clear-cut question; this is a commission he

relishes (p. 11). His job is 'ostensibly, to "puff" her;

and, if it is humanly possible, to explode her, either as

well as, or instead of' (p. 11). This description of

Walser that he assumes not only that there is a

suggests

'truth, ' centre, will account for everything, but

a which

also that he can find that truth. Belief and disbelief,

for Walser, then, amount to a black and white question of

fact. He intends, are told, to 'see all but believe

we

nothing'; that is, he proposes to observe but not give

credence to he sees, because he does not trust

what

(until, he is at the indisputable

appearances presumably,
4 however, highlights a paradox in
central 'truth'). This,

4I 'appearances' in
shall discuss the question of
to notions of character in The Magic Toyshop,
relation
Love, and Heroes and Villains in Chapter 4.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 42

the 'reporting' mode of reading he represents. As a

detached observer but also as a seeker of 'truth, ' Walser

situates himself outside of his text, in the audience at

Fevvers's show and at her narrative performance in the

dressing room, but what he seeks involves burrowing to the

centre, to discover the 'true story' that lies behind the

illusion the performance constructs. He situates himself

outside his text, yet seeks to penetrate its heart without

his 5
relinquishing original position.

Reviewers frequently identify Walser as a fellow

spectator; he represents the 'inside man. ' These

reviewers often encourage would-be readers to identify

with Walser since, as we have seen, his situation inside

the novel appears to map the progress and problems that

arise for the reader. Amy E. Schwartz, for example,

writes:

Fevvers takes up most of the novel's foreground,

but it is Walser, initially the unflappable
reporter who serves as the intermediary to
...
readers, accompanying them through various
stages of befuddlement. (New Republic, May
1985, pp. 38-41 (p. 39))

Elaine Feinstein claims:

Fevvers dominates the reader as easily as

... journalist who
she does Walser, the bewildered
is trying to ferret the true story of her
out
feckless life. (The Times, 2 September 1984,
p. 9a)

And Adam Mars-Jones writes:

5
This inside/outside especially in
opposition,
to the is also discussed
regard reader/text relationship,
in Chapter 2.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 43

The voice belongs to Fevvers, but the point of

view is the journalist Walser's, intrigued but
basically unconvinced; the reader's complex
nature, hungry for enchantment but also
resistant to it, is beautifully served. (Times
Literary Supplement (TLS), 28 September 1984,
p. 1083)

These reviewers map the reader/text relationship neatly

onto Walser's and Fevvers's 'subject/object' relationship;

however, the narrative 'voice' in the first part of this

novel does not belong solely to Fevvers, nor the 'point of

view' solely to Walser. Whilst Walser obviously does, to

some degree, occupy the place of the reader in the novel,

the London part is narrated in the third person. Ricarda

Schmidt describes it much more accurately as a 'mediating

omniscient narrator (who sometimes moves into Walser's

consciousness). '6 The novel, by reporting things which

'even Walser did not guess' (p. 12), continually makes it

clear that the story Walser intends to write about Fevvers

does not constitute the whole story of the novel.

By identifying Walser as a guide through the novel,

readers only repeat the reporter's own situating of

himself with regard to the object of his story, since as a

guide he plays both a marginal and a central role. As a

'guide' he is fellow observer figure, detached from the

a

events along with the reader, but he simultaneously

constitutes the central narrative thread which readers

attempt to keep hold of in order to orientate themselves

the I Walser in just

within novel. am, of course, using

6 Schmidt, in 'The Journey of the Subject in

Ricarda
Angela Carter's Fiction, ' Textual Practice, 3, no-1
(Spring 1989), 56-75 (p. 69)
.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 44

this capacity in this chapter; to show how the novel

dramatises particular modes of reading. (Chapter 6,

however, will focus upon Fevvers, to offer an alternative,

but complementary, reading of Nights at the Circus. )

In Fevvers's presence, Walser soon begins to lose his

sense of perspective, and we witness his failing attempts

to maintain a firm and controlling grasp over both himself

and his story. Walser endeavours to keep Fevvers in the

position of 'object, ' but from quite early in the novel

there is clearly a struggle for control of the narrative,

and for the subject and object positions. At one point,

for example, when the third person narrative is

introducing the three main protagonists, Fevvers, Lizzie

and Walser, it is interrupted by Fevvers's voice, and with

it the implied present tense, which usurps power and

easily takes over the scene: '"Ready for another

snifter? "' (p. 12). Fevvers's voice shifts the balance of

the narrative immediately since it suggests the supposed

object's refusal to be objectified; it is almost as if

Fevvers spurns being reported and wants to report herself.

Conversely, of course, her surge into the text at this

point may also be read as aa call for attention, as a

demand to be Fevvers, it appears, wants to be

reported.

both subject and object.

As if Fevvers's extraordinary life story and gravity-

defying act were not intoxicating enough, champagne and

erotic suggestion are mixed into Fevvers's provocative

narrative. Walser finds that he cannot tell the

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 45

difference between the effects of the alcohol and the

effects of Fevvers's flirtation: 'A seismic erotic

disturbance convulsed him--unless it was their damn'

champagne' (p. 52). This is reflected by the frequent use

of double entendre which links the sexual attack and the

narrative attack, and suggests, indeed, that they are the

same thing: Fevvers, for example, 'pulled the dripping

bottle from the scaly ice' and 'invitingly shook the

bottle until it ejaculated afresh' (p. 12). Similarly,

"'Ready for another snifter? "' (p. 12) might refer to the

champagne, but also represents a sexual 'come-one, ' both

of which are potentially intoxicating and bamboozling.

In order to maintain control of himself under this

attack Walser employs several tactics. One of these is to

attempt to write everything down, to fix his

interpretation of events in front of him on his notepad,

since for Walser, as a reporter, writing is his way of

controlling the world. Practically, this tactic has some

effect since the more Walser writes the less he drinks:

The young reporter wanted to keep his wits about

him so he juggled with glass, notebook and
surreptitiously looking for a place to
pencil,
not keep filling
stow the glass where she could
it. (p. 9)

Symbolically, too, by making use of his pencil, Walser

hopes to dominance: the pencil, like the

maintain sexual

champagne bottle, functions as a barely-disguised phallic

symbol. Walser casts himself in a productive and creative

and thereby attempts to

role, as reader and as writer,

assume narrative control.

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 46

The novel links writing and self-control

metaphorically: the following very long sentence, for

example, describes Walser's reaction to Fevvers's trapeze

act:

Her wings throbbed, pulsed, then whirred, buzzed

and at last began to beat steadily on the air
they disturbed so much that the pages of
Walser's notebook ruffled over and he
temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to
find it again, almost displaced his composure
but managed to grab tight hold of his scepticism
just as it was about to blow over the ledge of
the press box. (p. 16)

The description is retrospective, slotted inside the

interview in the dressing room after the stage

performance, and it underlines the resemblance between

Fevvers's performance on and off stage; Walser has the

same problems interpreting and reporting them both. The

passage draws an analogy between the near loss of both

Walser's notebook and his equanimity; and it is signalled

by the repetition of the word 'place': he temporarily

'lost his in the notebook, and 'almost displaced'

place'

his composure. The London section frequently makes use of

a pun in this passage on the word 'compose' to connect

Walser's writing to his state of mind. As a producer of

his Walser 'composes' himself by 'composing'

own script

his degree of composure is

the story, or put another way,

by his The final

represented the state of composition.

the reinforces the link by suggesting a

part of sentence

to Walser's He manages 'to

material nature scepticism.

tight hold his ' as if it and his

grab of scepticism,
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 47

notebook were the same thing, just as 'it was about to

blow over the ledge of the press box. '

If we trace the metaphor linking Walser's writing and

his self-control further through the novel, his gradual

loss of command over the former reveals a gradual

dissolution of the latter. For instance, towards the end

of the first section of the novel Walser's writing fails

to keep a distance between himself and his object of

study. Faced by Fevvers's seductive attack Walser almost

loses his composure and his composition, since his notes

cease to reflect his own interpretation of events:

Walser wilted in the blast of her full attention

[he felt] himself at the point of
...
prostration. The hand that followed their
dictations across the page obediently as a
little dog no longer felt as if it belonged to
him. It flapped at the hinge of the wrist.
(p. 78)

At this point, Walser is not composing his text, Fevvers

and Lizzie are dictating. This loss of control is also

shown as a physical, if only temporary, loss of the

writing implements when Fevvers grasps both pen and

notebook: '"You must know this gentleman's name! "

insisted Fevvers seizing his notebook, wrote it down'

and,

(p. 78). In doing so, she grasps the symbols of both his

narrative and sexual dominance; she therefore takes away

any pretence to control that Walser may have been

harbouring. Walser the book and struggles to

retrieves

retain his now fragile scepticism against further

rather

attack. However, Fevvers repeats this symbolic action a

few later, her foot on Walser's knee

pages when she places
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 48

and dislodges the notebook, as if to prove to him that she

can take control at any point (p. 83).

Walser vainly attempts to continue writing well into

the second part of the novel where, still working as a

journalist but now disguised as a clown in the circus, he

sends his despatches home from St Petersburg via the

British Embassy. The St Petersburg part of Nights at the

Circus describes circus life, and, according to Carter, it

has been crafted as if it were itself a circus:

The middle section is very elaborately plotted,

like a huge circus with the ring in the middle,
and it took me ages tinkering with it t? get it
right. A circus is always a microcosm.

Now that Walser's identity is split between two

professions, his writing style has changed with his

identity:

Walser reread his copy. The city precipitated

him towards hyperbole; never before had he
bandied about so many adjectives. Walser-the-
clown, it seemed, could juggle with the
dictionary with a zest that would have abashed
Walser-the-foreign-correspondent. (p. 98)

Language, Walser is learning, can be used for invention as

well as for reporting, for the creation of fictions as

for the fixing fact. As journalist/clown, he

well as of

is hovering the threshold between using language as a

on

transparent to the 'truth, ' and the sheer

medium report

pleasure of linguistic invention. This whole section

the freedom to juggle language, where the

celebrates with

7 John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview

(henceforth (London: Methuen,
referred to as Novelists)
1985), pp. 76-96 (p. 89)
.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 49

language of the text does not function merely as a

transparent medium for the communication of fact, but is

foregrounded and continually makes the reader aware of the

novel's linguistic status. Our attention is drawn towards

this surface by, for example, the many foreign languages

spoken, particularly by Fevvers (p. 128), by the songs

which Mignon sings but cannot understand (p. 132), and by

Walser's 'exchange with the speaking eyes' of the dumb

Professor of the chimpanzees (p. 108). It is a section

which, like Buffo, wears its insides on its outside, and a

portion of the 'most obscene and intimate insides, at

that' (p. 116). The language of the central section of the

novel, then, not only describes circus performances, but

its own status as performance; it

also celebrates

dramatises this freedom of invention on all levels, in the

content it describes, on the level of narrative,

paragraphs, syntax and individual words. The clowns, who

invent their faces and 'make' themselves (p. 121)

can own

are striking, and are frequently noted by critics as

the concern with the freedom

examples not only of novel's

of invention, but also of the breakdown of accepted

identity. 8 Walser his own clown face

notions of When sees

we are told that

he felt the beginnings of a vertiginous sense of

the freedom that lies
freedom He experienced
... dissimulation, the
behind the mask, within

8 Norris's comments in
See for example, Christopher
Derrida (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University
P. B. Turner's 'Subjects and
Press, 1987), p. 52; and Rory
Symbols, ' Folklore Forum 20, nos. 1/2 (1987), pp. 39-60.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 50

freedom to juggle with being, and, indeed, with

the language which is vital to our being, that
lies at the heart of burlesque. (p. 103)

Here, 'being' and language are intimately linked, as

Walser begins to comprehend the freedom not only of

inventing his own false identity, but also of linguistic

invention, by means of which identity may be constructed.

The writing of this section also reflects and celebrates

the freedom of the 'burlesque'--of inventive imitation and

caricature, of inversion and subversion. The narrative,

as many of the reviewers point out, fragments, and the

point of view not only shifts again and again but is often

ambiguous. There is a scene, for example, which is set in

Fevvers's hotel room and describes not only how Fevvers

resentfully takes care of Mignon (resentfully because she

assumes, mistakenly, that Walser and the ape-man's wife

are lovers), but also cuts backwards and forwards, in a

sort of montage effect, between the present moment and a

complete history of Mignon's life (pp. 126-44). The voice

throughout this section is that of the omniscient

narrator, but it also often appears to be mediated via the

consciousnesses of the characters present. The

of several

linguistic freedom celebrated in this part of the novel

in prose, which is
results many passages of over-ripe

perhaps best illustrated by Walser's own excessive and

overwritten copy.

This central section, however, not only celebrates

the freedom invention but to dissolve in

of also starts

its in invention and lushness

own excesses, uncontrolled
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 51

of narrative fabrication. This is symbolised by Buffo the

clown, for whom 'things fall apart at the very shiver of

his tread on the ground. He is himself the centre that

does hold' (p. 117). 9

not This process of dissolution due

to excess is dramatised again and again in the novel, but

perhaps the most memorable example is the clown's dance in

St Petersburg; the 'dance of disintegration; and of

regression; celebration of the primal slime' (p. 125), and

its repetition in the last section of the book, when the

clowns dance 'the whirling apart of everything' until they

'off face (p. 243). 10

dance themselves the of the earth'

The description of excess and freedom, which is acted

out in the writing of the novel, can be described as

functional. It can be interpreted as a dramatisation of

the corruption of uncontrolled inventiveness. This

interpretation is suggested by Buffo, who explains how

clowns--the most obvious symbols of excess in the

9 the Carter often uses

In
characterising clowns
allusions to the New Testament and the poetry of W. B.
Yeats. At this Carter encompasses both sources by
point
alluding to the third line of Yeats's poem 'The Second
Coming' (The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London:
Macmillan, 1963), 210-i1), which goes on to describe a
pp.
state of chaos and breakdown, which precedes a moment of
inception of a new and antithetical civilisation:

Things fall the centre cannot hold;

apart;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

10 danger much freedom is too

The notion of the of
important theme in The Infernal Desire Machines,
also an
where, for example, the acrobats of desire's unprohibited
leads to the landslide
and extensive rape of Desiderio
their but also the
which not only causes annihilation,
destruction of the entire travelling fair.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 52

novel--are a corrupting influence upon children: '"The

child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a

clown"' (p. 119). It also dramatises the limitations of

what appears limitless, where the sheer lushness of

invention is self-defeating and cancels out difference,

rendering everything the same. Adam Mars-Jones describes

this very clearly:

Angela Carter piles on the prodigies until

everything is equally miraculous--except that a
miracle needs a humdrum context, or at least a
whiff of the mundane to set it off. (TLS, 28
September 1984, p. 1083)

Walser is on the point of losing command of

journalistic language and consequently also on the point

of losing control of his text, because writing as a clown

is not even trying to control the world. Walser the

reporter is the producer of his text, of Fevvers and her

story, but it appears that Walser the clown is a product

of, and a performer in, the circus itself. As a member of

both professions he is balanced precariously between the

two polarised positions. Perhaps luckily for Walser, he

is relieved from his contradictory position when he loses

the physical capacity to write, having hurt his arm trying

to protect Mignon from attack by an escaped lioness.

Walser loses his controlling the world when he

mode of

cannot write, and therefore finds himself transformed:

'He is no longer a journalist masquerading as a clown;

willy-nilly, force has turned him into a

of circumstance

real clown' (p. 145). This description occurs exactly half

way through the novel in a very short chapter. Chapter

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 53

six of the St Petersburg part of the novel, as I mentioned

earlier, marks the centre of the novel; it also functions

as a hinge between one half of the novel and the other.

This half-page chapter both sums up the events so gar in

the novel then into the future. 11

and projects

Interestingly, at this point the novel switches briefly

into the present tense, and since the story is no longer

to be told in retrospect--as an interpretation of past

events--this particular shift of tense symbolises, and

indeed dramatises, the fact that readers will no longer be

encouraged to interpret events as reporters, separated

from narrative events by an apparent lapse of time. Now,

in order to read the rest of the novel, readers must be

prepared, like Walser, to spend their nights at the circus

in the ring rather than in the audience, involved in a

continual process of interpretation of changing events.

Here in the centre of this central chapter, I will abandon

my reading of Walser as the producer of his text, since at

this point it is clear that he is no longer in control; he

has been forced to give up his job as reporter and cannot

write.

11
Carter be imitating Samuel Beckett's novel
may
Murphy (London: Picador, 1973); the central section of
this novel serves a similar purpose.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 54

II

Just as the opening of Nights at the Circus portrays

Walser as a reliable ally for the reader, a reporter and

experienced observer who sees all and believes nothing--a

convincing depiction which, as I have demonstrated,

satisfies many reviewers--so this same opening

simultaneously suggests that he is an incomplete and

vulnerable character, who is lacking in self-knowledge.

In this way, Nights at the Circus encourages an

alternative reading of Walser as someone open to

manipulation and change, and suggests that the novel can

be read as a Bildungsroman, in which Walser is taken on a

journey of self-discovery. In this interpretation Walser

represents a second type of reader: one who journeys and

learns, and one who abandons him/herself to the text's

control. This mode of reading represents and celebrates

the power of the novel to challenge and change its

readers.

At the opening of the novel Walser is described as

vulnerable, as a man who 'had not experienced his

experience as experience' (p. 10). He is frequently

described as 'the young reporter' (p. 7), and is referred

to as somehow incomplete:

There remained something a little unfinished

him, He was like a handsome house
about still.
that has been let, furnished. There were
scarcely any of those little, what you might
call personal touches to his personality.
(p. 10)
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 55

Walser's vulnerability, it is suggested, is due to the way

he interprets the world around him from a detached

position; his 'habitual disengagement' (p. 8), we are

informed, extends even to his own identity; consequently,

he lacks something, and this 'something' is his own

subjectivity:

I say he had a propensity for 'finding himself

in the right place at the right time'; yet it
was almost as if he himself were an objet
trouve, for, subjectively, himself he never
found, since it was not his self which he
sought. (p. 10)

It is Walser's lack of self-awareness which leaves him

open to manipulation and change.

Walser's experience of life is described in terms of

an outside/inside opposition. None of his wealth of

reporting experience, we are told,

had altered to any great degree the invisible

child inside the man ... Sandpaper his outsides
as experience might, his inwardness had been
left In all his young life, he had
untouched.
not felt so much as onc2single quiver of
introspection. (p. 10)

He may the 'truth' about the material for his

seek out

but he has looked inside himself, for his

stories never

own centre. Lizzie, in the second part of the novel,

maintains that Walser is, as yet, unborn:

'Not hatched ' Lizzie summed him up.

out, yet,
'The clowns him with eggs as if eggs
may pelt
but his own shell don't break,
cost nothing
yet. ' (p. 171)

12 Duval (in 'Black Venus, '

Carter describes Jeanne
Black Venus) in exactly the same way: 'She never
experienced her experience as experience' (p. 9), and
'Jeanne was not prone to introspection' (p. 12).
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 56

The egg and hatching metaphor recurs throughout the novel

(it is first encountered at the end of the very first

paragraph of the novel, where Fevvers describes her own

unique entrance into the world). Walser's exterior

character, it seems, is the hard shell of experience, but

waiting inside the man is an 'invisible child, ' a part of

him which has yet to grow up. Fevvers describes this in a

different way when she sits across from Walser in the

train's dining car and puzzles:

What is it this young man reminds me of? A

piece of music composed for one instrument and
played on another. An oil sketch for a great
canvas. Oh, yes; he's unfinished. (p. 204)

According to Fevvers, Walser has yet to find his correct

voice for expression--he is a piece of music being played

on the wrong instrument. He is 'an oil sketch for a great

canvas' which has been conceived of, but not yet brought

to fruition.

It takes a train crash to break Walser's shell and

launch 'the child' into the world: though this is only

the first stage of Walser's 'hatching, ' the process being

later in the Walser's rebirth is

completed novel.

described as a 'sea-change! Or, rather, forest-change'

(p. 250). On its through Siberia the circus train is

way

dynamited and Walser, unconscious, and buried under a pile

of table-linen and other debris from the restaurant car,

is left behind for dead the main circus party is

when

by bandits. He is some time later, by

captured uncovered,

Olga, from Countess P's penitentiary for women

an escapee
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 57

murderers. (Walser is already, though unknowingly, linked

with Olga since he lodged at her mother's house in St

Petersburg, and introduced Olga's son, Ivan, to the life

of a clown. ) Olga discovers 'a ruddy, flaxen-haired young

man in a child's short, white trousers, sleeping sound as

if between white sheets on a feather bed' (p. 222), and she

wakes him with a kiss (the reference to 'Sleeping Beauty'

is made explicit). Finally, and symbolically, Walser's

hatching is celebrated by the breaking of a great many

eggs:

Walser crouched over the basket of eggs but

found they were easily crushed. Disgruntled, he
kicked the basket over and had some fun watching
the eggs that remained whole roll around ...
Walser had some more fun jumping on the rolling
eggs and smashing them. (pp. 223-24)

Walser is hatched as an innocent, a tabula rasa, an

empty sheet with nothing written on it (no story, no

text): 'Like the landscape, he was a perfect blank'

(p. 222). 13 is Walser's which has been hatched

It centre

but this informed, is as vacant as the

out, centre, we are

surrounding landscape: he is described as 'the empty

horizon' (p. 236). Walser's inside has

centre of an empty

his outside and he has become the

changed places with

used to lurk inside him, unnoticed.

vulnerable child which

It is this child-Walser whom Olga and the other escaped

women convicts teach to walk:

13 tabula image throughout Carter's

The rasa recurs
fiction are similarly reborn; see
when other characters
particularly Chapter 6.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 58

They lifted him to his feet, to see if he could

walk. After a few tries and demonstrations, he
got the hang of it and laughed out loud with
delight and pride as he toddled with increasing
confidence back and forth. (p. 222)

Now that Walser's inside is dominant, he is left without

knowledge of his other, outer, confident self. The

Shaman, whom Walser meets in the forest, and who adopts

him as an apprentice, imagines Walser as a 'little bird

hatched from an egg whose shell had disappeared' (p. 264).

Walser now experiences everything as experience, but is

unable to assimilate or interpret this experience since he

can no longer observe, only participate:

He is a sentient being, still, but no longer a

rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility,
without a grain of sense, and sense impressions
alone have the power to shock and to ravish him.
(p. 236)

In his apprentice Shaman state, then, Walser represents a

reader controlled by his text: he sees all and believes

everything, since, for him at this point, as for the

Shaman: 'there existed no difference between fact and

fiction' (p. 260)

.

But is for Walser's hatching out? Is

who responsible

this the result of the text's manipulation? Or Olga's

kiss? Walser's text is of course Fevvers and her story,

and she is partly responsible; at least Walser's

fragmentary memories suggest that she is:

The odds of cast-offs knocking about

and ends
inside the box that used to hold his wits
kaleidoscope-wise, in
sometimes come together,
image tender thing that
the of a feathered,
time, have sat upon his egg.
might, once upon a
(p. 236)
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 59

(At the end of the novel, however, when Fevvers sees that

'he was not the man he had been or would ever be again, '

she assumes that 'some other hen had hatched him out'

(p. 291). ) Fevvers and the Shaman, have a great deal in

common: Ricarda Schmidt notes that 'both their livings

depend on the fact that their society accepts them,

believes in them, and gives them food/money in return for

the spiritual vision they offer' ('The Journey of the

Subject, ' p. 71), and describes their shared practice of

the confidence trick. The Shaman, however, truly believes

that 'seeing is believing, ' whereas Fevvers offers this as

a challenge to her audience. Walser the apprentice

Shaman, therefore, represents a reader totally seduced by

the text who fails to recognise that there is any trick or

magic involved.

Walser hatching could be said to have begun at the

beginning of the novel, where, in Fevvers's dressing-room,

he was seduced both sexually and textually by the very

flirtatious aerialiste and her (almost) incredible story:

'Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him

her' (p. 60). 14 It is her voice, which

along with

represents both Fevvers's body and her narrative, which

15
has lured Walser toward her and held him spellbound:

14 interview John Haffenden, Carter

In the with
claims to have Fevvers on Mae West--'Mae West
modelled
Wings, ' and notes: 'The Mae West controls the
with way
toward herself in her movies is quite
audience-response
extraordinary' (Novelists, p. 88).
15 Carolyn See, Nights at the Circus for
reviewing
the New York Times Book Review (2 February 1985, p. 7),
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 60

Her voice. It was as if Walser had become a

prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre
voice, a voice made for shouting about the
tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife....
Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice,
imperious as a sirens. (p. 43)

At the end of the interview, however, when Fevvers finally

stops talking, Walser finds even her silence fascinating.

Walser is hooked, both narratively and sexually, and he is

therefore left deeply unsatisfied when their meeting ends:

Walser was intrigued by such silence after such

loquacity. It was as though she had taken him
as far as she could go on the brazen trajectory
of her voice, yarned him in knots, and
then--stopped short. Dropped him. (p. 89)

He consequently joins the circus in order to follow her

around the world.

By the central chapter, Part 2 Chapter 6, Walser

acknowledges, but still does not comprehend, his obsession

with Fevvers:

He [Walser] suffers a sense, not so much that

she [Fevvers] and her companion have duped
him--he remains convinced they are confidence
tricksters, so that would be no more than part
of the story--ýýt that he has been made their
dupe. (p. 145)

comments upon the magic qualities of Fevvers's narrative:

'The combination of this bizarre history and Walser's
whether Fevvers has
state of confusion make one wonder
a spell. '
been sitting for an interview or casting
16
Walter Kendrick, in Village Voice Literary
Supplement, October 1986, pp. 17-19, compares Walser with
Carter's de Sade's Justine in
description of the Marquis
The Sadeian Woman, concluding that:

The characters who interest Carter most, whose

stories she loves to tell and retell, all share
this unfledged quality--even Lizzie
Borden.... [from Black Venus] In the course of
their experience rips them open,
stories, real
empties them out, often with appalling violence
sexiness. (p"18)
and always with ravishing
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 61

There is a vital difference between the women's having

'duped him' and his having been 'made their dupe'. If

Fevvers and Lizzie had duped him, Walser would no longer

think they were confidence tricksters; he would believe in

them and that would be the end of the investigation. He

has instead a sense that he has become their creature,

even though they have not fooled him. That is, he does

not know, he only 'suffers a sense, ' that he has been made

a dupe, and to be made a dupe is to have become the object

17 Walser, it has been
of someone else's story. appears,

made a dupe precisely because of his determination to

avoid being duped. It is the very fact that Walser has

the confidence to assume that he can get to the 'truth'

behind the Fevvers story which makes him so vulnerable to

seduction, and therefore open to change, because Fevvers's

lure his desire to master both her and her

relies upon

story. The more Walser strives to get hold of Fevvers's

story, the more the story takes hold of him.

Walser as reporter is like the reader who assumes

discover the 'truth' behind the novel, but is

s/he can

trapped by this very assumption. In this way Nights at

the Circus the strategies of its own

anticipates

interpretation and demonstrates the limitations of a

to a text. Shoshana Felman

reading which sets out master

makes the following comment about psychoanalytic readings

17
Walser is only in long line of Carter's
one a
as objects. See
male characters who are constructed
below, Chapter 5.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 62

of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, but it is equally

applicable to readings of Nights at the Circus:

To master [is] to refuse to read to 'see

... ...
it all' is in effect to 'shut one's eyes as
tight as possible to the truth'; once ore, 'to
l°
see it all' is in reality to exclude.

Nights at the Circus also dramatises, and criticises, the

opposite extreme to a 'reporting' mode of reading which

aims to give the 'facts. ' As we have seen, Walser as

apprentice Shaman is like a hypothetical reader who has

abandoned the quest for a definitive reading and only

experiences rather than interprets the text: that is, one

who is manipulated and constructed by the text.

III

The modes of reading dramatised within Nights at the

Circus are reenacted by the reviews of the novel-19 These

reviews can be organised into two categories: there are

those which attempt to dominate the text in question, and

18Shoshana Writing Madness:

Felman, and
(Literature/ Philosophy/Psychoanalysis, translated by
Martha Noel Evans and the author (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1985), p. 234.
19 The reviews have been from a survey of
selected
British and American literary journals and newspapers.
Review has been for this chapter on the
material chosen
basis of relevant comments on the pleasures and
difficulties reading Nights at the
encountered when
Circus. Ironically, of course, in the very act of
selecting reviews I am unavoidably exerting some sort of
control over both the reviews and the novel whose control
I am attempting to I too am trapped in the
analyse;
inevitable and interpreting. The
problem of reading
I describe here is also true of
polarisation of reviews
reviews of other works by Angela Carter.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 63

by this I mean those reviewers who attempt to stand back

from the text and offer the reader the 'gist' of the

story, an outline of the plot, and a sense of its central

meaning. And there are some reviewers who acknowledge,

and abandon themselves to, the seductive powers of this

novel, as Walser abandons himself to Fevvers and her

story. The first category of review follows, of course,

the accepted rubric for the genre: to prepare for

prospective readers a neat and manageable package which

includes a summary of the plot, a sense of the book, its

aims and goals, and usually some sort of value judgement.

These reviewers often take the stance of a universal

reader: they refer to 'what the reader feels here' rather

than to what they feel. They assume the position, like

Walser as reporter, of 'ring-side'20 spectators who try to

make sure that their nights at the circus are spent safely

in the audience, and out of the circus ring. Yet they

also set out to grasp and report what is at the centre of

the novel, 'truth' lies within or behind it. In

what

effect, these reviewers attempt to contain the novel, as

if they were the audience wrapped around the circus

whole

ring.

Within the 'reporter' category of reviewers there are

two differing only in the degree to which

subcategories,

they do to the novel: the

respond, or not respond,

20 to describe Evelyn
Carter uses this same metaphor
as an outsider, a spectator, watching the gradual
dissolution New York City in The Passion of New Eve:
of
he was 'all agog in [his] ring-side seat' (p. 15)
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 64

reviewers who are least sympathetic to Nights at the

Circus tend not to progress beyond the first section,

while others, sceptical but fascinated, praise the London

portion but are disappointed by the later parts of the

novel. For some of the former the novel appears to be an

object of ridicule. Bruce Van Wyngarden's response is a

typical example:

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter is the

early leader in the 'Wierdest Novel of the Year'
contest If there is a message here, I failed
...
to find it. (Saturday Review, January 1985,
p. 79)

These reviewers regard the novel in the way Walser

regarded Fevvers before he met her: as a story to

'explode. ' The reviews often exhibit only the reviewers'

creativity, their own production of the story; reviewers

may even have their review already written before they

encounter the novel (from other reviews of Nights at the

Circus, for example, or from Carter's previous work--there

is a lot of evidence of repetition between reviews, some

of which I will demonstrate). Several of these reviewers

maintain that the book is a hoax, just as, before he met

her, Fevvers was to be an entry in Walser's series of

interviews 'tentatively entitled: "Great Humbugs of the

World"' (p. 11). John Mellors writes:

Angela Carter's performers are on 'the ludic

game'. They work in Colonel Kearney's circus,
and the Colonel's motto is 'The bigger the
humbug, the better the public likes it'. That
is the 'the ludic he insists,
way to play game',
'in Bamboozlem'. That could be
one word:
Angela Carter's too. (Listener, 11
motto,
October 1984, p. 30)
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 65

For the few reviewers who remain rigidly outside the novel

expecting to observe from a distance, the experience of

the text is never open; they do not experience the text

, as experience' and they retain their scepticism fully

intact. Nights at the Circus encourages but resists any

reading which aims to contain it and extract the essence,

as Geoffrey Trease, amongst others, discovers. Trease

maintains a distance between himself and the novel, but

consequently finds himself unable to grasp any meaning:

It is all utterly (and presumably intentionally)

unreal, a monstrously tall story appropriate for
an artiste of the high wire. This talented and
imaginative novelist must know what it--and
-
she--are about. I am not sure that I do.
(British Book News, January 1985, p. 47)

The problem here is that Carter's novel suggests that it

be both looked at and looked through, but is peculiarly

resistant to the latter: it appears to promise, but

denies, the as Fevvers appears to be

reader control--just

Walser the scoop of her life story, but denies

offering

him the 'truth' and the total control he seeks. Fevvers

demands to be looked 'LOOK AT ME!, ' but cannot be

at,

(in both intellectual senses of the

grasped physical and

'Look, touch Look! Hands off! ' (p. 15).

word), not ...

Some are charmed by the opening section of

reviewers

the novel, but are later disappointed by, and condemn,

two three. For of these reviewers, the

parts and many

they the text itself is intimately

control praise within

and subsequent loss

related to their own sense of control,

These resemble Walser

of control, as readers. reviewers
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 66

as journalist who at the beginning of the novel gives the

illusion of being in control, but finds his sense of

control being eroded; unlike Walser, though, several of

these reviewers identify this crisis as a major fault in

the novel. Such reviewers begin by praising the

impressive opening of Nights at the Circus only to lament

the subsequent breakdown of limits and dissolution into

chaos. Adam Mars-Jones, for example, writes:

Nights at the Circus doesn't so much start as

break like a wave; the first third of Angela
Carter's new novel is a glorious piece of work,
a set-piece studded with set-pieces The
...
balance tips at the beginning of the second
section, and never manages to regain -
equilibrium... The achievement of the first
section is never repeated Nights at the
...
Circus starts off in full commanding cry, and
later disappoints the towering expectations it
has created for itself. (TLS, 28 September
1984, p. 1083)

And Paul Clay claims that, at the beginning of the St

Petersburg section,

Carter's florid, energetic style begins turning

an already complicated narrative into a three-
(Time, 25 February 1985,
ringed extravaganza.
p. 87)

(Walter Kendrick did his homework for his survey

obviously

of all Carter's work in The Village Voice Literary

of

Supplement (October 1986, pp. 17-19) by reading other

he this sentence from the Time

reviews: plagiarises

for ) Richard Martin, in a review with

review word word.

Circus' (he have found the

the title 'Three Ring may also

inspiration for his title in the review in Time), claims

that the first section of the novel

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 67

is by far the most riveting and accomplished

section of the novel ...
the first section alone
is worth the irritation and confusion of the
remainder. (American Book Review, May 1986,
pp. 12-13. )21

There is always, of course, one exception to a rule, and

this takes the form of a review by Michael Wood:

Things are clearer once we have been given

Fevvers' past life, and the novel moves from
London to St Petersburg and Siberia. (London
Review of Books, 4 October 1984, p. 16)

The criticisms levelled at the later, 'uncontrolled, '

parts of Carter's novel, I suggest, are in response to the

reviewers' own sense of disorientation as the novel begins

to challenge a 'reporting' mode of reading.

Adam Mars-Jones is dismayed when he can no longer

reduce the narrative of Nights at the Circus to Walser's

interpretation of Fevvers's story. 'Without Fevvers's

voice and Walser's point of view, ' he claims, 'the

narrative falters':

21 ('Facing the Past, ' 20 December

A TLS reviewer
1969, p. 1329) makes similar comments about Heroes and
Villains:

The control of the material in the early

is formidable This only falters at
chapters ...
the Marianne, forced into marriage
moment when
with Jewel and finding herself passionately
attracted to him, is lost.

Marianne, the heroine of this novel, is another of

Carter's 'observer' figures who prefers to remain an
Marianne's of her home environment to
onlooker. shift out
a life among the Barbarians and her complex attraction
toward Jewel both the way she reads her
challenge
surroundings, just Walser's experiences of the circus
as
his. Neither
and his attraction toward Fevvers challenge
narrative is told exclusively from either Marianne's or
Walser's point of view, but both of these characters, at
in the place of the
the opening of each novel, may be read
reader, and both are challenged and changed.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 68

The point of view becomes curiously fragmented,

tending to see Fevvers through Walser's eyes
while supplementing this partial perspective
with a feverish omniscience elsewhere. (TLS, 28
September 1984, p. 1083)

Worse than a novel which has no strong and reliable

central character to act as a guide, it seems, is a novel,

Nights at the Circus for example, which appears to suggest

such a character--which attracts readers by confirming

particular accepted reading conventions--but which

subsequently questions that character's central function.

Several reviewers find fault with the sheer excess

and elaborate invention which characterise the middle

section (and the opening of the Siberia section) of Nights

at the Circus; it destroys, they claim, the careful

balance, and the enchantment, of the opening. Amy E.

Schwartz, for example, finds it all exhausting:

Such extravagant invention sometimes becomes a

strain, not on readers' credibility--it's hardly
an issue--but on their endurance. (New
Republic, May 1985, p. 40)

Adam Mars-Jones feels that the novel loses all sense of

direction and stable identity: 'The sentences lose their

sense of mission, ' he writes, and the many 'compulsively

elaborated histories are likely to baffle the reader, and

weaken the focus the book' (TLS, 28 September 1984,

of

of the
p. 1083). Carolyn See notes the seductive qualities

two the but also describes them

second sections of novel,
22
as overwhelming and over-sweet:

22
In several Carter's novels chaos and
of earlier
have been described boring. Desiderio in The
excess as
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, for example,
is bored by the excess of Doctor Hoffman's exotic
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 69

By this time the reader begins to feel like a

child who's spent all his allowance on 10 pounds
of chocolate chip cookies and eaten every one of
them down to the last crumb. Page by page, even
chapter by chapter, 'Nights at the Circus' is
delicious, a sweet for the mind, but after a
while, it's hard not to get a little queasy.
(New York Times Book Review, 24 February 1985,
p. 7)

These reviewers' readings, however, once again act out the

novel's own dramatisation of the corruption and

dissolution of too much freedom.

The central St Petersburg section of the Nights at

the Circus can also be interpreted as an ironic

representation of the 'centre' of the book which reviewers

are trying to grasp. What it represents, of course, is-

'the centre that does not hold' (p. 117), a 'centre' which

is shown to be, like the circus itself, a performance, a

celebration, and a critique of the freedom of invention.

It is also a dramatisation of Fevvers's repeated challenge

to her audience, 'seeing is believing' (pp. 15,17,83),

be seen on the surface of the text,

where only what can

the language, like Buffo's face, this language has

exists;

no 'truth' behind or beyond it:

And what am I without my Buffo's face? Why,

nobody at all. Take away my make-up and
is An absence. A
underneath merely not-Buffo.
vacancy. (p. 122)

it is to interpret this portion of the

possible central

just interprets the circus ring itself:

novel as Walser

expressionist device,
What a cheap, convenient,
this little 0! Round like an
this sawdust ring,
in the centre; but give
eye, with a still vortex

illusions, they Similarly, Evelyn,

and the chaos cause.
in The Passion is bored by the corruption and
of New Eve,
chaos of New York.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 70

it a little rub as if it were Aladdin's wishing

lamp and, instantly, the circus ring turns into
that durably metaphoric, uroboric snake with its
tail in its mouth, wheel that turns full circle,
the wheel whose end is its beginning, the wheel
of fortune, the potter's wheel on which our clay
is formed, the wheel of life on which we all are
broken. 0! of wonder; 0! of grief.

Walser thrilled, as always, to the shop-soiled

yet polyvalent romance of the image. (p. 107)

The centre of the novel is represented by the circus ring,

which from the 'see all and believe nothing' standpoint of

many reviewers appears as only the Zero, or the empty

circle symbolised by the '0. ' Howeve;, given 'a little

rub as if it were Aladdin's wishing lamp, ' which would

involve 'the positive or negatives of belief' (p. 10), the

ring turns into a 'magic circle' (p. 107), which represents

a powerful and disruptive version of our world turned

inside out.

So far in this section I have described reviewers who

attempt to master and control Nights at the Circus, and I

have shown how the novel both encourages and yet

frustrates this mode of reading. As I suggested at the

opening of this chapter, readers who appear to be

controlling the text might also be interpreted as readers

who are being controlled by their text, on the grounds

that it is the text which provokes the reader's responses.

I have already suggested that reviewers who think

themselves in control of the novel in the opening section

are often responding to the control which they recognise

in the text itself. It is therefore possible to interpret

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 71

Nights at the Circus as a novel which not only manipulates

its readers, but also as one which dramatises its own

critical reception, since the reviews of this novel not

only elucidate the text, but also reproduce it

dramatically: the novel, 'through its very reading ...

acts itself out. '23

IV

The novel, as I have shown in section II, also

dramatises another mode of reading where Walser represents

readers who abandon themselves to the text's control; some

reviewers respond to the novel in this way. 'Nights at

the Circus, ' Kathy Stephen writes, 'is the sort of book

that is more enjoyable to read--and very enjoyable it

is--than to reflect upon' (Books and Bookmen, October

1984, p. 16). But what does happen when a reviewer ceases

to reflect upon a book? Some reviewers are themselves

caught up in the experience of Nights at the Circus, and,

rather like Walser as apprentice Shaman, they are unable

to stand back and interpret. To review at all, of course,

reviewers must establish some sort of distance between

themselves and the text, in order to describe the

experience: several resort to metaphor in order to

compare it to other experiences which are beyond their

23 in Writing and
These are Shoshana Felman words
Madness, p. 148; they are equally applicable to Nights at
the Circus_
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 72

control. These reviews therefore do not report facts

about the novel, or attempt to offer their readers the

'gist. ' Rather, their own writing imitates the novel as

they, too, celebrate the freedom to juggle with language.

Some reviewers describe Nights at the Circus as if it

were a dream. Kathy Stephen, for example, begins her

review:

I dreamed I spent a spate of nights at the

circus, recently. It was a particularly wild
show, and every now and then I thought I would
be over-whelmed; but I stayed with the dream,
secretly not wanting it to end.

Later in the same review, she writes:

It is rather like a violent dream: all-

encompassing at the moment but somehow forgotten
upon awakening, as though the mind could not
bear the effort of holding it. (Books and
Bookmen, October 1984, p. 16)

The difficulty of putting Nights at the Circus into

is here likened to the experience of trying to

perspective

recall a dream which just eludes the memory. Other

describe the in terms of the imagery of

reviewers novel

intoxication--either alcohol or drugs. Amy E. Schwartz,

for example, describes how Walser accompanies readers

'through of befuddlement' (New Republic,

various stages

Gilbert notes how Fevvers

May 1985, p. 39). And Harriet

getting Walser drunk on

and Lizzie remain sober whilst

She draws an analogy between Walser's

champagne.

her the novel: the

experience and own encounter with

be even more intoxicating:

novel, she suggests, may

feels that his brain is turning

It's Walser who
to bubbles--as well he might.
Carter's Nights at the Circus has
Angela
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 73

the same effect on the reader. And, more

ebullient, even than Fevvers, Carter mixes the
drinks: politics and magic, history and
fantasy, lush sensuality and narrative
conjuring, jokes, adventures, literary
allusions, dialogue, dialectic--all into
poured
a glass the shape of a picaresque nineteenth-
century novel The effect is strange,
...
exciting, alarming, not unequivocally
pleasant.... Has Carter written the first
addictive n '4
gel? (New Statesman, 28 September
1984, p. 30)

Carter's earlier works have provoked similar

responses. For example, Miranda Seymour writing for The

Times claims:

The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter is best

described as an astonishing experience. (The
Times, 25 November 1982, p. 10)

Caroline Moorehead, in her review of The Magic Toyshop,

The Bloody Chamber and Heroes and Villains for The Times,

writes:

Angela Carter's imaginary worlds are so

original, so bizarre and so full of talent that
they have the quality of dreams. (4 July 1981,
p. 7d)

Two New Statesman reviews link The Infernal Desire

Machines to a drug experience. Barry Cole suggests it is

Carter who has been taking drugs:

24Walter in Village Literary

Kendrick, Voice
Supplement, October 1986, p. 19, also appeals to the notion
of addiction: 'There's no one like Angela Carter: if
you're not an addict now, get that way at once. ' He also
writes:

A surprising number of people, I've discovered,

have a special fondness for Carter that they
nurture like a private vice. When they learn
you share it, their eyes get weirdly bright and
a little smile curls their lips: another
initiate in the cabal, another aficionado of
delicious wickedness. Let's go down to the
dungeon and compare notes! (p. 17)
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 74

Thoughout the book there's the feeling that the

author is more than touched by a dose of the
LSDs. Still the reader is made uncomfortable by
the thought that she knows precisely what she's
doing. (21 July 1972, p. 99)

And, ten years later, Harriet Gilbert suggests that the

book itself is like a drug:

Explicitly, in the consciousness of her

narrator-hero, implicitly in her writing style,
Ms Carter maintains the tension throughout this
mescalin trip of a book. (30 July 1982, p. 21)

Auberon Waugh describes how the very excesses of this

novel enchanted him:

No doubt some readers will have no patience with

the exuberant ramifications of Miss Carter's
imagination. For my own part, I can only
testify that I read it enthralled, fascinated
and bewitched. (Spectator, 20 May 1972, p. 772)

And Lisa St Aubin de Teran describes the experience of

reading Black Venus in terms of an intoxicating journey:

We emerge as it were, Bonny and Clyde wise,

having conducted a slightly drunken and very
tour. (Guardian, 17 October 1985, p. 27)
violent

It is often not clear, however, whether these dreaming or

intoxicated learn anything from Carter's texts.

readers

The activity of reading and writing for these reviewers

constitutes a celebration of the text's multiplicity--a

multiplicity which the novel itself both celebrates and

What these reviewers have in common,

also criticises. all

is to believe all: not a

however, a desire see all and

trace of scepticism is expressed.

In this the previous one, I have

section and

described how Nights the Circus dramatises two

at

incompatible modes of reading; it posits and criticises

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 75

both a reporter-like reading, where the reader assumes

control, and an experiential mode of reading where the

text dominates. What I have not stressed, however, is how

the novel superimposes these readings, right from the very

opening, and how this superimposition dramatises an

important and creative power-struggle. What my two

readings of Walser show is that there can be no

possibility of compromise where the reader is partly in

control and the text partly in control: this novel

superimposes two totally incompatible modes of reading.

Nights at the Circus, I will argue in Chapter 6, thrives

on the very superimposition of these two absolute

perspectives in order to both attract and enchant the

reader, but simultaneously to dramatise and demonstrate

how this enchantment has been orchestrated. The tension

between the two modes of reading generates the

created

the to change the reader, so that the novel

power of novel

becomes a Bildungsroman for both Walser and the reader.

the Fevvers suffers from an

Towards the end of novel

identity She has been from most of the

crisis. separated

from from an audience. She

circus party, Walser, and

to the enigma that had sustained

ceases perform, abandons

her performance--the mystery of her wings--and

loses her sense of her own unique self:

consequently
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 76

Since she had stopped bothering to hide her

wings, the others had grown so accustomed to the
sight it no longer seemed remarkable.... Where
was the silent demand to be looked at that had
once made her stand out? (p. 277)

Fevvers, once of monstrous and extraordinary size, now

discovers herself 'diminishing' (p. 273):

the tropic bird looked more and more like the

London sparrow as which it had started out in
life, as if a spell were unravelling. (p. 271)

and Lizzie comments:

"'You're half the girl you were. "' (p. 280)

In other words, just as the St Petersburg section

dramatised the limitations of limitlessness, where

difference is cancelled out, so Fevvers's miraculous

difference is also cancelled when she has no audience, or

when all of her audience have become performers.

Fevvers's (and Lizzie's) performance--her 'spell'--was of

course, also her Scheherazade-like narrative, which drew

Walser and her audiences toward her and kept them

enthralled. It was her, now abandoned, performance, the

novel self-consciously points out, which produced in her

own eyes and in the eyes of her audience, the illusion of

both her size and her uniqueness. This is made clear

earlier in the novel, for example, at the end of the

London Fevvers finishes recounting her life

section, when

story to Walser. We are informed not only of the

narrative break, but also of the break of the

illusion--including the illusion of Fevvers's super-human

dimensions:

Fevvers seemed as if utterly overcome, exhausted

to the suddenly, as if
point of collapse, quite
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 77

by the relaxation of tremendous amounts of

energy.... Her heavy head hung down like a bell
that has ceased tolling. She even seemed to
have diminished in size, to have shrunk to
proportions only a little more colossal than
human. (p. 87)

Towards the end of the novel, therefore, Fevvers gets

smaller as her capacity for commanding wonder (and also

her financial viability) shrinks: 'She was so shabby that

she looked like a fraud and, so it seemed to the Colonel,

a cheap fraud' (p. 277). The novel, too, as I have already

documented, after opening in 'full commanding cry' (TLS,

28 September 1984, p. 1083), also diminishes in stature in

the eyes of many of the reviewers; it appears to lose the

strong identity or direction promised at the opening, and

has exploded into a mass of set-pieces and fragmented

narratives.

At this stage in the novel, Fevvers longs to see

herself reflected in Walser's eyes. That is, she craves

to see reflected back her best image of herself, which she

so carefully constructed for Walser in her London

narrative, he scrupulously inscribed in his

and which so

notebook (and in his heart):

The young American it was who kept the whole

story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she
longed for him to tell her she was true. She
longed to herself reflected in all her
see
in his grey eyes. (p. 273)
remembered splendour

She longs to herself in Walser's eyes and to

see reflected

see her history down, because both of these, the

written

visual and the forms, represent the way Walser

written

'reflects' or has 'reflected upon' her. Walser, she

believes, represents her ideal audience; he will

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 78

reactivate her performance and confirm her identity as

she, herself, has constructed it. She also hopes that he

will confirm her as a sexual being, confiding to Lizzie

that 'pleasure alone is my expectation from the young

American' (p. 281).

When she eventually re-encounters Walser, however, he

offers her no such satisfaction: 'Fevvers felt the hairs

on her nape rise when she saw that he was looking at her

as if, horror of horrors, she was perfectly

natural--natural, but abominable' (p. 289). Under Walser's

gaze she feels her identity slipping away:

She felt her outlines waver; she felt herself

trapped forever in the reflection of Walser's
eyes. For one moment, just one moment, Fevvers
suffered the worst crisis of her life: 'Am I
fact? Or am I fiction? Am I what I know I am?
Or am I what he thinks I am? ' (p. 290)

Walser's gaze at this point in the novel is of no use to

Fevvers because he has lost the journalist's ability to

'see believe nothing' (p. 10), and has gained the

all and

Shaman and his people's mode of reading the world which

the that 'seeing is believing': 'They

relies upon notion

knew the they They believed in a space they

space saw.

apprehended. Between knowledge and belief, there was no

for doubt' (p. 253). Walser is like the

room surmise or

Carter's who have submitted themselves

reviewers of novel

to the manipulation of the text:

his grey eyes, his

in
There was a vatic glare
brilliance, his eyes with the
eyes of glossy
A vatic glare and no trace of
pin-point pupils.
Furthermore, they seemed to
scepticism at all.
have lost their to reflect. (p"289)
power
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 79

For the sake of identity Fevvers needs to inspire

wonder; that is, she needs an audience who are willing to

suspend disbelief in her supernatural attributes. She is

constructed by the gaze of the audience who find her

wondrous--and in this case it is the 'wind of wonder'

(p. 290) from the audience of natives in the Shaman's hut,

who revive Fevvers: 'the eyes told her who she was'

(p. 290), they 'restored her soul' (p. 291). And their eyes

tell her that she is aa combination of 'Hubris,

imagination and desire! ' (p. 291), a first class performer,

and author of her own script (even if she is an author who

is dependent upon an audience): 'She sank down in a

curtsey towards the door, offering herself to the company

25
as if she were a gigantic sheaf of gladioli' (p. 291).

The novel, of course, is also dependent upon its

audience of readers, and initially relies, for publicity,

on the 'wind of wonder' whipped up by the audience of

reviewers. As I have already demonstrated, this novel

orchestrates the scene of its own, divided, critical

It also stages the reasoning behind the

reception.

particular reception which it both inspires and

Just Fevvers is 'twice as large as life'

anticipates. as

(p. 15), excessive and incredible creature, so

an exotic,

the novel is also enormous, and produced out of what

to as uncontrolled inventiveness,
appears many readers

25 discussion of
Chapter 6 contains a detailed
Walser's and Fevvers's dependence upon each other.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 80

which celebrates its own sheer colourfulness and excess.

'Like Fevvers, ' Gina Wisker has written,

the work calls attention to itself: polemic is

translated into a rococco style replete with
literary and cultural echoes. Like Fevvers,
perhaps, 'In a secular age, an authentic miracle
must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain
credit in the world. '26

The novel, Wisker suggests, by its extraordinary style, by

its excessive use of intertextuality, and by, of course,

its presentation of a dazzling, perhaps fraudulent, winged

woman, calls attention to itself; it attracts an audience

who not only wonder at its sheer excesses, but also

bristle with scepticism. Valentine Cunningham calls upon

Yeats (one of Carter's favourite intertextual sources) to

describe the way Nights at the Circus advertises itself:

'Processions that lack high stilts have nothing

that catches the eye, ' said Yeats. On Fevvers's
bizarre journey to Byzantium the stilts are as
high as Angela Carter can risk making them.
(Observer, 30 September 1984, p. 20)

Many readers of this novel, like Walser at the opening of

the novel, will 'relish' the assignment to "'puff"

...

and, if it is humanly possible, to explode' (p. ll) this

novel. This is a novel which appears to depend upon

sceptical for its identity, and for its

reviewers own

readership, just Fevvers depends upon reviews of her

as

act for her publicity: 'Do not think the revelation she

is the halls; far from it. If

a hoax will finish her on

26 Werewolves: How
Gina Wisker, 'Winged Women and
do we read Angela Carter? ' Ideas Production, Issue 4:
and
Poetics (1986), 87-98 (p. 91). She is quoting Nights at
the Circus, p. 17.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 81

she isn't suspect, where's the controversy? What's the

news? ' (p. 11). The more rumours and gossip Fevvers's act

generates, the bigger her audience at the next

performance. Hence the Colonel has extraordinary stories

about her published in the press:

That morning, the newspapers carry an anonymous

letter which claims that Fevvers is not a woman
at all but a cunningly constructed automaton
made up of whalebone, india-rubber and springs.
The Colonel beams with pleasure at the
consternation this ploy will provoke, at the way
the box-office till will clang in the delicious
rising tide of rumour: 'Is she fiction or is she
fact? ' His motto is: 'The bigger the humbug,
the better the public likes it. ' That's the way
to play the Ludic Game! (p. 147)

The more scepticism and controversy voiced by reviewers of

Carter's novel the more popular it may become. This is

Nights at the Circus's inbuilt marketing device. It may

be interpreted as Carter's response to the lack of serious

critical interest aroused by her earlier work (which

Walter Kendrick has called '20 years of prolific neglect'

(Village Voice Literary Supplement, October 1986, p. 17)),

and also as an ironic commentary upon what constitutes a

best-selling novel in our present media-constructed

bigger the novel produces in

society. The the controversy

its the bigger be its success with the

own reviews, will

reading public, and therefore the bigger the sales.

Typically, in Carter's work, alternative consequences

of such a plot also suggested. Colonel Kearney's

are

publicity misfire: when he publishes a

stunts seriously

second, contradictory, item in the foreign news which

that Fevvers is 'all woman, ' but also

proclaims not only
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 82

that she is secretly engaged to the Prince of Wales

(p. 147), the paper is read by bandits who dynamite the

circus train and kidnap Fevvers in order that she might

'"intercede with [her] mother-in-law-to-be, the Queen of

England"' (p. 231) on their behalf.

The end of the novel re-evaluates a reporting mode of

reading, since the novel, like Fevvers, needs an audience

in order to be able to perform. In this way, the

structure of the whole novel imitates the circus which it

describes. Angela Carter recounts how the St Petersburg

portion is crafted like a giant circus, but, similarly,

the very opening and the very ending, which dramatise the

importance of the reporting mode of reading, might also be

interpreted as the audience which surrounds this circus.

The disruptive circus section, therefore appears to be

safely contained within the frame of its audience. As I

have shown in this chapter, however, Nights at the Circus

is a novel which, like a circus, turns itself inside out.

The inside and the outside, the audience and the circus

performance, the reader and the text, are not only

mutually dependent, but also reversible.

The very ending of the novel confirms the necessity

for both of the modes of reading we have been discussing.

Walser is needed as an audience to witness the wonder of

Fevvers, but he simultaneously experiences his new sexual

relationship with Fevvers as an encounter which totally

transforms him. The coexistence of these two modes of

'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 83

reading is represented once again by both textuality and

sexuality. When Fevvers rises from her curtsey to the

natives, Walser demands, once more, that she tell him

about herself: '"What is your name? Have you a soul?

Can you love? "' (p. 291). Walser's questions re-activate

both Fevvers's narrative and her sexual demands upon him:

"'That's the way to start an interview! " she cried. "Get

out your pencil and we'll begin! "' (p. 291). Though, it is

the pencil, of course, which symbolises the phallus, it is

Fevvers, ironically who increases in size: 'Now she

looked big enough to crack the roof of the god-hut, all

wild hair and feathers and triumphant breasts and blue

27 is
eyes the size of dinner plates' (p. 291). Fevvers

able to reconstruct herself as both larger-than-life

wonder, and as sex symbol; and Walser is finally able to

unite both his inner and outer selves: he 'took himself

apart and put himself together again' (p. 294).

Consequently, Walser not only experiences sex with Fevvers

as a transformational encounter--the 'sharp spasm of

erotic ecstasy' (p. 294) marks the completion of his

hatching--but he also attempts to reflect upon it:

'Smothered in feathers and pleasure as he was, there was

still one question which teased him' (p. 294). He reflects

upon is, like so many of the

one particular problem which

problems in this of fact or fiction: this

novel, a matter

time, symbolically, Walser has 'penetrated' to the truth,

27 reversals, in
examine gender roles, and role
Chapter 6.
'Nights at the Circus': Reporting, Reviewing, Reading 84

only to find that the truth was a fiction. '"Why, "' he

asks her '"did you go to such lengths, once upon a time,

to convince me that you were the 'only fully-feathered

intacta in the history of the world'? "' (p. 294).

Fevvers's response to Walser might also be read as a

remark to all reviewers of the novel:

'You mustn't believe what you write in the

papers! ' (p. 294)
 CHAPTER 2

INTERPRETING DESIRE: CENTRES AND MARGINS IN 'THE INFERNAL

DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN'

With Hoffman, she became more self-conscious,

having been excessively so to start with.

Lorna Sagel

I didn't say that there was no center, that we

could get along without the center. I believe
that the center is a function, not a being--a
reality, but a function. And this is absolutely
indispensable.

Jacques Derrida2

1 Lorna Sage, 'The Savage Sideshow' in New Review,

39/40 (1977), 51-57 (p. 52).

2 in Linda A Poetics of
Cited Hutcheon,
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, (London:
Routledge, 1988), p. 60.
Interpreting Desire 86

The process of interpretation relies upon

distinctions between what is central in and what marginal

to a text; and what we select as central and discard as

marginal, and the relationship between the two, is

governed by reading conventions which produce the internal

relations of the text: 'character, ' 'plot, ' and so on.

Chapter 1 suggested the importance of the notion of

'centres' in Nights at the Circus--particularly narrative

centres and central characters to whom readers can relate.

By at first offering and then withdrawing textual

compliance with the reading conventions which construct

these 'centres, ' Nights at the Circus reveals them to be

inherently unstable. However, the end of the novel re-

examines and revalorises the reader's desire for such

centres. This chapter extends this discussion to

demonstrate how some of Angela Carter's other fiction

explores disrupts the distinction between what is

and

central in a text; primarily, it

and what marginal

considers a novel in which desire, including the reader's

desire, is It begins, however, by

of prime concern.

discussing Carter's and yet eccentric literary

own central

the mixed reception of her

status, and re-emphasising

however, be with the ways in

work. The main concern, will

which Carter's interrogation of the central/marginal

dichotomy and how this

questions reading conventions

the texts themselves affects the

questioning within

interpretation. Carter's fictions, this

process of

chapter argues, both rely upon and yet simultaneously

Interpreting Desire 87

challenge the preconceptions which order and unify a text,

and in so doing they self-consciously explore the reading

process. My analysis will examine some of the seductive

mechanisms at work in Carter's writing, and will involve a

further analysis of the reader/text relationship, focusing

particularly upon the ways in which readers themselves are

written into the text as both central and marginal.

Carter, for example, uses irony as a way of destabilising

our notions of desire-as-control, but at the same time,

irony, in some sense, is the ultimate form of control,

which is part of the mechanism by which the novel seduces

its readers. This chapter deals specifically with

Carter's sixth novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of

Doctor Hoffman, since, of all her fiction, this seems to

me to be the one most overtly concerned with the notion of

its own textual boundaries.

As I in the Introduction, one of the

pointed out

pleasures and also one of the frustrations of working on

the writing of Angela Carter is the conspicuous absence of

academic commentary. Although she is widely acclaimed and

has been for twenty-five years, there is

publishing over

still little criticism, apart from reviews, and

published

her has faced reception. She launched

work always a mixed

herself into the centre of the literary world

successfully

in the mid-sixties with three novels; the second of which,

Interpreting Desire 88

The Magic Toyshop, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial

Prize for 1967, and the third, Several Perceptions, won

the Somerset Maugham Award in 1968. This 'established

her, seemingly' Lorna Sage has written, 'as one the

of

distinctive voices of the times. ' However, as Sage also

points out, Carter's next and more experimental novel,

Heroes and Villains (1969), marked a turning point in her

career. Sage describes this change in Carter's literary

status as a shift from being acclaimed to becoming

'notably, and more problematically, a literary outsider, '3

and reports Carter recalling in an interview that one

reviewer, while relishing the book, said that she would

not be winning any more literary prizes ('The Savage

Sideshow, ' p. 52). The publication history of Carter's

work also bears witness to this change from acceptance to

rejection, from potential centrality to marginality. In

an article written in the early 1980's Lorna Sage

explains:

Heroes and Villains was the last of her novels

published by Heinemann in England and Simon and
Schuster in the United States. Since then, she
has become something of a nomad, with several
publishers in both countries and no single,
secure arrangement. The break with Heinemann
signaled the end of the brief period in
which--at least in her case--'central' and
'eccentric' tastes She became, in
overlapped.
deliberately, in part inevitably, a figure
part
of the counterculture. (DLB, p. 208)

3
Lorna Sage, in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography (Detroit, Michigan: Bruccoli Clark, 1983),
Vol. 14, 'British Novelists 1960, ' pp. 205-12 (p. 207
since
and p. 206 Further references will be given
respectively).
in the text as DLB.
Interpreting Desire 89

The words 'central' and 'eccentric' here important,

are

because Carter is always identified as an eccentric

writer. In the mid-eighties, when eccentricity resumed

centre stage, the publication of Nights at the Circus and

Black Venus and the filming of some of her fiction The
as
Company of Wolves brought Carter back into fashion.

Walter Kendrick, writing for The Village Voice (October

1986, p. 17), reflects that 'all at once, it's respectable

to have a taste for Carter. ' In 1981 Sage reviewed three

paperback reissues where she both salutes and yet laments

Carter's rising popularity:

It's slightly eerie to see someone as Gothic,

speculative, vagrant as Angela Carter in the
process, apparently, of becoming a modern
classic I suspect that some of her fans,
...
like me, got so used to moralising about her
marginality that we'll be perversely
...
reluctant to see her becoming respectable.
(Observer, 12 July 1981, p. 37)

Carter has since been republished by some very

'respectable' presses, including Chatto, Virago (which has

also come in from the margins4), Penguin and Picador, yet

while most of her work is now available in Britain, it is

very difficult to track down in the USA and Canada (even

though all but the early novels have been quite recently

4 See, for Gerrard's Into the

example, Nicci
Mainstream: How
Feminism Has Changed Women's Writing
(London: Pandora, 1989), which contains one section
appropriately entitled, 'Feminist and Independent Houses:
On the Fringe Their Foot in the Centre' (pp. 20-25).
with
This section documents the recent fortunes of feminist
presses including Virago, The Women's Press, and
Bloomsbury, which 'are now part of the literary
establishment in that have seemed impossible
a way would
in the 1970's' (p. 24).
Interpreting Desire 90

reissued by Viking Penguin). Still, however, ten years

after Sage's review describing Carter's increasing

popularity, Carter remains marginalised. She is, her

various blurbs maintain, 'One of the most original and

most acclaimed novelists of her generation' (Nothing

Sacred, Virago, 1982), 'Our most brilliant and ingenious

of contemporary writers' (The Passion of New Eve, Virago,

1982), 'The most stylish English prose writer of her

generation' ((John Mortimer) The Sadeian Woman, Virago,

1983); and it has become customary to mention her name in

lists of important contemporary novelists. The French

author Philippe Sollers has even incorporated her (and a

'fictional' review of The Passion) into his 1983 novel,

Femmes, writing, 'UNE ROMANCIERE ANGLAISE DES PLUS

ORIGINALE! ANGELA LOBSTER! '5 The continued absence of

scholarly attention, however, suggests that her writing

remains strangely excluded from the contemporary canon.

Carter is, of course, also marginalised to some

degree because she is a woman writer; she is perhaps

further marginalised because she does not write the kind

of novel women are 'supposed' to write. In an recent

interview Ann Snitow, she has commented interestingly

with

the difficulties a woman: it is very

upon of writing as

difficult when one is in

writing about a whole culture

in from it.... Women are marginalised. I

some sense exile

sort this by deciding the margin is more

of cope with

5 Philippe Sollers, (Paris: Gallimard,

Femmes
1983), p. 293.
Interpreting Desire 91

important than the page' (Village Voice Literary

Supplement, June 1989, p. 14). In 'Family Romances, ' the

first section of Nothing Sacred, and in several

interviews, 6 Carter describes writing not only as a woman

but also as an 'outsider' who is 'rootless, ' owing to her

father's Scottish origins. In London, Carter writes, her

family 'did not quite fit in, thank goodness; alienated

is the only way to be, after all' (Nothing Sacred, p. 16).

Lorna Sage has suggested that 'Carter's nomadic habits

with publishers seem to confirm her general air of

displacement' ('The Savage Sideshow, ' p. 52). Sage has

also remarked that 'Angela Carter's fiction poses

precisely the question of what is central, what eccentric

in contemporary British writing. ' Her work takes over and

subverts many established central/marginal hierarchies;

for example, she subverts the 'genre'/'sub-genre'

hierarchy, Sage points out, by using romance, Gothic,

as

pornography, detective fiction, and science fiction with

the suggestion that these are now the appropriate and

(paradoxically) central' forms (DLB, p. 205).

II

try to the plot of The Infernal

I shall summarise

to this summary by
Desire Machines, but I wish preface

6 interview with Ann

See, for example, the same
'The Savage Sideshow, '
Snitow, p. 16, and with Lorna Sage,
p. 53.
Interpreting Desire 92

remarking that this centre which I am about to draw out of

the novel is only an illusion of a centre. Summaries of

any of Carter's work are not only difficult but usually

uninteresting, since--as I hope to show--the interest lies

in what might be termed the 'margins' which are woven of

the marvellous and the extravagant. Elaine Jordan

attempts to summarise the concerns of The Infernal Desire

Machines, in 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative

Fictions, ' but admits that 'this story is so evocative and

so acute in its response to contemporary Western culture

that summarizing its significance is likely to make a fool

of me. '7 In typically Carteresque fashion, The Infernal

Desire Machines self-consciously dramatises the

limitations of attempts to reduce the story to a single,

dominant narrative. Summaries proliferate throughout the

text itself; the introductory section, for example,

sketches out possible narrative backbones, which includes

what Desiderio, the hero, identifies as the climax of his

story. On the very first page Desiderio offers the reader

the barest his history, which proves how

outline of whole

be: he reports that he 'was a

uninteresting a summary can

young man who happened to become a hero and then grew old'

(p. 11). Just two later he offers a less laconic

pages

summary:

7 Elaine 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's

Jordan,
Speculative Fictions, ' in Plotting Change: Contemporary
Women's Fiction, by Linda Anderson (London: Edward
edited
Arnold, 1990), pp. 19-40 (p. 32).
Interpreting Desire 93

And so I made a journey through space and time,

up a river, across a mountain, over the sea,
through a forest. Until I came to a certain
castle. And...

But I must not run ahead of myself. I shall

describe the war exactly as it happened. I will
begin at the beginning and go on until the end.
(p. 13)

This second summary gives more information, and may even

serve to tease or tantalise the reader by offering a

sample of coming events, but it offers nothing

substantial. Indeed, it describes a very common fairy-

tale narrative outline which The Infernal Desire Machines

shares with a whole wealth of other fiction, including

much of Carter's own. The very fact that this particular

narrative is so conventional--that is, so pre-written by

us as readers--is part of the point here since it

immediately draws attention to itself as narrative

convention, rather than a historical report. The

interruption in this passage also draws attention to the

artificiality of Desiderio's narrative and his self-

conscious attempts to write a linear and exact account of

his life which will begin at the beginning and go on until

the end. On the very same page he describes the

impossibility of doing any such thing:

Sometimes, I think of my journey, not only

when
does everything seem to have happened all at
in kind fugue of experience but
once, a of ...
in life seems to have been of
everything my
equal value. (p. 13)

Desiderio's account contains many examples of running

itself, is constantly to
ahead of the effect of which
Interpreting Desire 94

remind the reader of the narrative 8

production. David

Punter argues that narrative in The Infernal Desire

Machines functions by the Hoffman principle of

'persistence of vision': it appears to be teleological

but is riddled with the previews which Desiderio offers,

which Punter refers to as 'premature ejaculation. 19 By

revealing future events in the story, the summaries serve

both to expose and to undermine the reader's dependence

upon a teleological narrative. This is an example of what

Linda Hutcheon, in a discussion of the post-modernist

novel, calls 'using and abusing' narrative convention,

where 'provisional alternatives to traditional, fixed

unitary concepts' of narrative are offered 'in full

knowledge of (and even exploiting) the continuing appeal

of those very concepts' (A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 57

and p. 60 respectively, my emphasis)"10

Returning to my own 'summary, ' the novel tells of an

old man, Desiderio, writing his memoirs about a war

8 this
One example of another writer who employs
technique of jumping ahead, which disrupts the
chronological narrative and upsets readers'
preconceptions, would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) (London: Picador, 1978).

9 Carter: Supersessions of
David Punter, 'Angela
the Masculine, ' in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction,
25, no. 4 (1984), 209-22 (pp. 210-11).

10 of this practice
Perhaps
the most extreme example
in Carter's takes
work place in Carter's extraordinarily
'The Fall River Axe Murders' in
claustrophobic short story
Black Venus. This describes the events leading up to the
fatal Borden her parents, but
morning when Lizzie murders
the 'climax, ' the murders themselves, although continually
signalled, never actually take place within the narrative
boundaries.
Interpreting Desire 95

between reason and imagination, and between reality and

freedom. The hero, the young Desiderio, is sent on a

mission to find and defeat the enemy, Doctor Hoffman, a

scientist whose experiments have succeeded in perverting

traditional notions of time and space, and whose machines

materialise people's desires. He thereby generates

hallucinations in the entire population of a city. The

Minister, Desiderio's employer, is attempting to defend

the city by the sheer power of his uncompromising

rationality. Robert Clark has neatly defined the

opposition between Doctor and Minister as that between

'the surreal-symbolist attempt to liberate humanity from

the repressions of reason and history, ' and the pragmatist

and positivist 'whose dull, sober and safe uniformity

triumphs in the end. '11 Desiderio's mission sends him on

a picaresque journey during which he falls in love and

travels Hoffman's daughter, Albertina, who appears in

with

various disguises. When Desiderio finally finds and

confronts the Doctor he learns that Hoffman wishes to use

him in his reason and in

as a key component war against

his Desiderio (perhaps accidentally) kills the

confusion

Doctor and is then forced to kill his beloved Albertina.

Carter raises the issue of what is central and what

is level in The Infernal Desire

marginal on a thematic

11 Carter's Desire Machine, '

Robert Clark, 'Angela
in Women's Studies--An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, no. 2
(1987), 147-61 (p. 154).
Interpreting Desire 96

Machines. One simple technique she employs to unsettle

the central/marginal relationship is to contextualise what

would usually be thought of as examples of such a

relationship, and show that context is always variable and

open to reinterpretation, and the relationship therefore

reversible. For example, the Minister and Desiderio are,

seemingly, central figures--the Minister 'virtually ruled

the city single-handed' (p. 17), and Desiderio is the

Minister's chief aid--and both are centrally situated in

the city, which is the very focus of the war. In the

context of a meeting with Hoffman's Ambassador, however,

the Minister, the city, and Desiderio are made to appear

marginalised. Desiderio describes the Ambassador as 'no

common agent':

He behaved like an ambassador of an exceedingly

powerful principality visiting a small but
diplomatically by no means insignificant state.
He treated us with the regal condescension of a
first lady and the Minister and I found
ourselves behaving like boorish provincials who
dropped our forks, slopped our soup, knocked
over our wine glasses and spilled mayonnaise on
our ties while he watched us with faint
amusement and barely discernible contempt.
(p. 32)

The Minister and Desiderio, who are accustomed to assuming

a central role, are forced by Hoffman's Ambassador

(Albertina in disguise) to read themselves as marginal,

where s/he represents an alternative centre. They are

also forced to endure the humiliation which accompanies a

marginal itself as a sudden loss of

role, which manifests

confidence 'boorish' behaviour. In this

and provincial

way, Desiderio, his Minister, the city, are shown to

and
Interpreting Desire 97

be defined by their context, a context which is subject to

changes of perspective. In exactly the same way, later in

the novel, Desiderio has to reread his own and Albertina's

identities in the light of his experience with the

Centaurs; he explains:

I felt myself dwindle and diminish. Soon I was

nothing but a misshapen doll clumsily balanced
on two stunted pins, so ill-designed and badly
functioning a puff of wind would knock me over,
so graceless I walked as though with an audible
grinding of rusty inner gears And when I
...
looked at Albertina, I saw that though she was
still beautiful, she also had become a doll; a
doll of wax, half melted at the lower part.
(p. 176)

Desiderio's description of himself closely resembles the

way Fevvers sees herself in the Siberia section of Nights

at the Circus: both Desiderio and Fevvers lose their

self-confidence in their own unique identities and both

consequently see themselves diminishing in size. They

also regard themselves as 'unnatural, ' as freaks.

Many of Carter's novels explore possible alternative

realities in which central and marginal positions are

destabilised; these often take the form of 'through-the-

looking-glass' worlds where accepted values and

conventions inverted. 'The Acrobats of Desire'

are

section The Infernal Desire Machines, for example,

of

portrays the alternative world of the fairground which

Desiderio describes 'a sub-universe' (p. 120)

as whole

existing outside time and space:

The travelling fair was its own world, which

location or temporal
acknowledged no geographic
for everywhere we halted was exactly
situation
Interpreting Desire 98

the same as where we had stopped last, once we

had put up our booths and sideshows. (p. 98)

(This familiar and important symbol of rootlessness and

freedom in much of Carter's fiction is fully explored when

it takes the form of the circus in Nights at the Circus. )

The bearded lady, the alligator man, and the other

inhabitants of the fairground are completely marginalised

from what Desiderio calls 'the common world' because of

their 'difference' (p. 98); they wonder at Desiderio's

description of the city, which he refers to as 'another

reality, ' 'as if were an earthly paradise from which they

were barred forever' (p. 101). However, within the context

of the inverted world of the fairground the 'abnormal'

becomes 'normal, ' and the so called 'freaks' who populate

12 Here,
the fairground hold a central position. roles are

reversed and it is Desiderio who fails to conform, since,

as he explains, 'I had the unique allure of the norm. I

was exotic precisely to the extent of my mundanity'

(p. 101). Carter clearly that what appears to be

shows

marginal in one context must be reinterpreted as central

within another, and vice versa. This reversibility

hierarchy by exposing it
destabilises the central/marginal

as a product of convention.

12
This topic is the focus of Katherine Dunn's
Geek Love (New York: Warner, 1990).
extraordinary novel,
The novel describes how a carnival couple, Lily and Al
Binewski birth to family freak children by
give a of
experimenting other things, drugs and
with, amongst
insecticides. It the rise to power (and
charts
centrality) of Arturo, the 'Aqua Boy' whose charismatic
following
rhetoric and thirst for power spawns a religious
of people who are intoxicated by the mixture of attraction
to become 'special' like him.
and repulsion, and want
Interpreting Desire 99

Using the same relativising technique The Infernal

Desire Machines questions the hierarchical notion of a

social structure which distinguishes between a central

'culture' and marginalised 'subcultures. ' In this novel

Carter portrays a series of alternative 'subcultures' and

in so doing she raises some issues of race and gender

relations since the central/marginal opposition can, on

several occasions, be equated with a white/non-white

and/or a male/female opposition. For example, in the

city, because of his ethnic and class origins--he is 'of

Indian extraction' (p. 16) and the son of a poor

prostitute--Desiderio feels himself to be detached and

marginalised from the white capitalists for whom he works.

Once outside the context of the city, however, and on

board the river people's barge, he assumes another

identity and explains: 'I blessed that touch of Indian

blood my mother had all her life cursed for it gave me

hair black enough and cheekbones high enough to pass among

the river people for one of their own' (p. 70). In this

new context, and renamed Kiku, he sees the possibility of

a more central role:

If I murdered Desiderio and became Kiku for

ever, I need fear nothing in my life ever, any
more.... I would become officially an outcaste
but, I had my allegiance with the
since signed
I would longer linger on the
outcastes, no
margins of life with a delicate sneer on my
face, that I were Marvell or
wistfully wishing
that I were dead. (pp. 80-81)

The informed in Carter's best

river people, we are

National Geographic (see New York Times Book Review,

style
Interpreting Desire 100

The river people, we are informed in Carter's best

National Geographic style (see New York Times Book Review,

8 September 1974, p. 7), have been marginalised by a series

of white European settlers who have taken over Indian

land, imposed European rule, and spread disease. Some of

the more fortunate dispossessed Indians have been forced

to take to the waterways in barges where they trade but

still remain relatively hidden from and ignored by the

world. Desiderio feels comfortable with these people

because they appear to have broken off all contact outside

their own movable communities, and to be immune to the

central/marginal issue: 'Over the years, [this tribe's]

isolated and entirely self-contained society had developed

an absolutely consistent logic which owed little or

nothing to the world outside' (p. 70). They even use a

language to negate the problems of what is

which appears

central or marginal, offering a possible alternative

existence which just 'is': 'There was [no] precise

equivalent for the verb "to be", so the kernel was struck

straight the Cartesian nut and one was left only

out of

the fact of existence' (p. 71).

with naked, unarguable

Ironically, these people whom Desiderio describes as

'outcastes' come closest to being a

are a people who

The a distinct race, 'the purest

caste. river people are

surviving strain of Indian, ' where 'those who married

the forbidden to return to their

outside river clans were

families to to member of the tribe again

or even speak any

as long as they lived' (p. 70). The river people are

Interpreting Desire 101

outcasts and 'outcastes' and yet they are also a caste.

These people, Desiderio learns, are not as self-sufficient

as they at first appear since to remain a caste they

necessarily define themselves against other castes and

hence interact with 'the world outside' in a

central/marginal relation. Desiderio also discovers that

they have their own complex power hierarchies which

marginalise him: 'More than ever I realized their life

was a complex sub-universe with its own inherent order as

inaccessible to the outsider as it went unnoticed by him'

(p. 87). Also, since race is not an issue within this

community, the river people organise themselves in other

central/marginal relations which, for instance,

marginalise women. The women are 'ordered below' when the

barges 'reached a place of any size' (p. 72) so as not to

be seen by 'landsmen'; they are also cut off from view

from their own people since they are continually masked

behind a thick layer of makeup. Desiderio describes the

women as if they were mechanical people:

I found that all the women moved this same, in

stereotyped way, like benign automata, so what
box speech, it was
with that and their musical
to feel they were not fully
quite possible
human. (p. 73)

The automaton, the puppet, and the doll, are some of

Carter's favourite images used to describe women who

13 Desiderio, however, is
conform to sexual stereotypes.

13 This is made very clearly in Paulina

point
Palmer's 'From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird Woman:
article,
Angela Carter's Magic Flight, ' in Women Reading Women
 Interpreting Desire
102

the real 'outcaste' since he belongs neither to white

governing classes in the city nor does he have in
a place
the river people's world. He is destined linger
to on the
margins of life, but of course he is the
also central
figure, the 'hero, ' of the story.

III

An important characteristic Carter's

of writing which

complicates the central/marginal distinction in her

all of
fiction, and one of the features is
most commented upon,
intertextuality. 14 Carter has linked her writing with the

Surrealist method of taking familiar things and making

them strange, and she claims that she regards 'all of

Western Europe as a great scrap-yard from which you can

assemble all sorts of new vehicles bricolage. '15 The

...
Infernal Desire Machines exhibits some of the most obvious

Writing, edited by Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester, 1987),

pp. 177-205.

14
For the moment, I am using the term
'intertextuality' in the very broad sense, defined in M.
H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms, p. 200, to
signify

the multiple ways in which any one literary text

echoes, or is inescapably linked to, other
texts, whether by open or covert citations and
allusions, or by the assimilation of the
features of an earlier text by a later text, or
simply by participation in a common stock of
codes and conventions.
15 (London:
John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview
Methuen, 1985), p. 92. Further references will be given as
Novelists and page numbers will appear in the body of the
text.
Interpreting Desire 003

examples of the workings of this 'bricolage' technique,

and one of the problems facing the reader is coping with

the wealth of allusions which seem to both construct and

destabilise the text and its reading. The novel, then, is

assembled out of a plurality of texts rather like a

surrealist film: the reader is continually bombarded with

combinations of names from, and fragments of, other

literature, Hollywood films, music, Greek mythology, the

visual arts, popular culture, and more. Gina Wisker makes

the point that 'Carter's literary borrowings are always

overt, foregrounding both the source and the reason for

the borrowing, '16 and one need only read the title or be

aware of the names of most of the characters in this novel

to get the intertextual flavour. The allusions appear at

every level of the novel, from quotations which are

clearly identified by the narrator to single words which

of other texts but cannot be

carry echoes or memories

called quotations. An example of the former occurs when,

Desiderio is provided with a suit by the

at one point,

peep-show proprietor (Doctor Hoffman's old Professor)

by Albertina in the
which contains a quotation written

pocket. Desiderio describes how he

found of paper with the following

a scrap
quotation from de Sade written on it ...

'My passions, concentrated on a single point,

the assembled by a
resemble rays of a sun

16 'Winged Women and Werewolves: How

Gina Wisker,
do we ' in Ideas and Production: A
Read Angela Carter,
in the Issue 4: Poetics, 87-98
Journal History of Ideas,
(p. 93).
Interpreting Desire 104

magnifying glass; they immediately set fire to

whatever object they find in their way. ' (p. 97)

Later, when the Centaurs decide to integrate Desiderio and

Albertina into the 'celestial herd' (p. 190) by tatooing

them with pictures of the Sacred Stallion and nailing iron

shoes to their feet, Albertina seemingly makes use of this

very quotation to avoid what promises to be a fatal

initiation ceremony:

She raised herself up on her elbows as high as

she could, and, shading her eyes with her hands,
she gazed into the far distance I knew she
...
was searching for her father's aerial patrols.
However, I did not believe in the patrols. Yet,
as she trembled, I saw it was not with fear but
with hope--or, perhaps, a kind of effortful
strain; she gripped my hands more tightly, until
her nails dug into my palm. I remembered the
scrap of paper in the pocket of the peep-show
proprietor's nephew. 'My desires, concentrated
to a single point... ' (p. 191)

To Desiderio's amazement (though he misremembers the

quotation) he sees their rescuers in the distance, and, at

the very moment when the first lethal incision is to be

made, the Centaurs's sacred tree bursts into flames

enabling both Desiderio and Albertina to escape. This is

a straightforward example of a typical Carter technique

where a quotation functions both on the level of discours

and histoire (and thus problematises the distiction

between them): the quotation both introduces

intertextuality into the language of the text, and

simultaneously to take place within the

causes action

story.

A second type of allusion, the single suggestive

word, is another distinctive feature of all of Carter's

Interpreting Desire 105

fiction: it teases readers by constantly suggesting

intertextual sources but offers nothing These

graspable.

allusions function rather like Dr Hoffman's illusions in

the city:

The great majority of the things which appeared

around us were by no means familiar, though they
often teasingly recalled aspects of past
experience, as if they were memories of
forgotten memories. (p. 19)

Reviewers respond by listing endless references to other

writers, artists, and musicians, in attempts to capture

the style and spirit of her writing, but this only serves

to show how the novels resist easy categorisation: the

lists produced in one review of a particular book seldom

agree with those in others. Yet there is a curious

agreement between reviewers in terms of the metaphors used

in their attempts to identify the genealogy of The

Infernal Desire Machines: a surprising number, for

example, choose to use food imagery, listing her sources

as ingredients in recipes. Barry Cole entitles his piece

'Devilled Pud, ' and explains:

The novel is reminiscent of so many disparate

writers that I hesitate to name them (reviewer's
shorthand). But Bernanos, Kafka, Dickens and
Lewis Carroll make a nice and tasty pudding.
(New Statesman, 21 July 1972, p. 99)

Another review is entitled 'Sinister Slices' and includes

this comment :

Sade, Swift, Genet, Bram Stoker, Defoe, Lewis

Carroll more may have flavoured the
and many
linguistic but the final result is the
mixture,
(Times Literary Supplement, 2
author's own.
June 1972, p. 622)

And Barry Baker describes the novel in these terms:

Interpreting Desire 106

A dash of Bosch, a bit of de Sade, and a pinch

of Pauline Reage are the necessary ingredients
for this weird tale. (Library Journal, 99
(August 1974), p. 1958)

This use of cooking imagery (which is not limited to

reviews of The Infernal Desire Machines) may represent

reviewers' attempts to domesticate, and therefore further

marginalise, Carter's otherwise unclassifiable writing (it

is difficult to imagine the same imagery being used so

frequently to describe a contemporary male writer's work).

One result of Carter's 'encyclopedism' is that, for many

readers, everything in The Infernal Desire Machines seems

to suggest itself as intertextual; readers inevitably

attempt to privilege some allusions above others, but the

text resists this by crowding material from other texts in

such excess that none can stand as central. In this way,

the novel appears to dramatise Barthes's notion of

intertextuality, where 'the writer can only imitate a

gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only

power is to to counter the ones with the

mix writings,

others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of

them. '17

Carter's novel, then, claims for itself a central

the texts marginal since they

place and renders all other

are fragmented recombined within the writing of

all and

this however, her novel appears to

novel. Simultaneously,

texts to
be situated on the margins of a host of other

it if they central (hence the

which refers as were

17 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (Glasgow:

Fontana, 1977), p. 146.
Interpreting Desire 107

reader's desire to trace and identify them). The

relationship of Carter's text to these other texts is a

complex one: Carter's text is inside all the other texts

and yet they are inside it. One of the terms Jacques

Derrida uses to describe this complex relation between

inside and outside is 'invagination, ' which he explains as

follows:

Invagination is the inward refolding of la gaine

(sheath, girdle), the inverted reapplication of
the outer edge to the inside f a form where the
then 1?
outside opens a pocket.

The metaphor of invagination can be used, for example, to

describe the function of a framing device ('la gaine'),

for example a title, which is not only on the margins of a

novel, that is, at the beginning, arguably before the

novel has begun, but which simultaneously folds in upon

itself to create a 'pocket' or centre, since it appears to

offer an interpretive key to the text. Derrida's model of

invagination will allow me to describe some of the

processes at work when reading The Infernal Desire

Machines, at the same time my reading of Carter's

while

novel help to clarify my interpretation of Derrida's

will

term. I realise that there has been considerable

female body parts as metaphors for

criticism of the use of

literary 19 think that this metaphor is

models, but I also

18 Jacques 'Living On: Border Lines, ' in

Derrida,
Deconstruction by Harold Bloom, Paul de
and Criticism,
Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis
Miller (New York: 1986), pp. 75-176 (p. 97).
Continuum,

19 See for instance Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,

'Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle, ' in Diacritics, 14, No. 4
 Interpreting Desire
108

deliberately disturbing, and is particularly appropriate

for The Infernal Desire machines, for
and much of Carter's

other provocative work (see Chapter 4). In Carter's work

the vagina is a symbol of desire fear, functions
and and
both to attract and repel. Typically, it is fantasised as
vagina dentalis: the Barbarian men in Heroes and
Villains, for example, are drawn toward Marianne, and
Jewel rapes her, even though it is believed that

'Professor women sprout sharp teeth in their private

parts, to bite off the genitalia of young men' (Heroes and

Villains, p. 49). Similarly Buzz, in Love, examines

Annabel to check that 'there were no concealed fangs or

guillotines inside her to ruin him' (Love, p. 94). The

whole of Carter's short story, 'The Cabinet of Edgar Allan

Poe, ' revolves around Edgar's fascination yet repulsion

from his mother: the repulsion dates from the day he and

his brother witnessed the birth of their sister. This

(Winter 1984), 19-36; Spivak, 'Displacement and the

Discourse of Woman, ' in Derrida and After,
edited by Mark Krupnick _Displacement:
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1983), pp. 169-95; and Alice Jardine, 'The
Hysterical Text's Organs: Angles on Jacques Derrida, ' in
Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 178-207. Christie V.
McDonald criticises Derrida's use of the terms 'hymen' and
'invagination' in her interview with him
('Choreographies, ' in Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1982), 66-76
(p. 71)). He responds by explaining that although the
gendered significance of the words had not escaped him,
neither term simply designates figures for the feminine
body. 'Invagination, ' he maintains, has

always been reinscribed as a chiasmus, one

doubly folded, redoubled and inversed. From
then on, is it difficult to recognise in the
not
movement of this term a 'representation of
Woman'? (p. 75)
Interpreting Desire 109

leads him to a celibate marriage where, finally, his

when

wife dies, he approaches the corpse and 'Taking from his

back pocket a pair of enormous pliers, he now, one by one,

one by one by one, extracts the sharp teeth just as the

midwife did' (Black Venus, p. 61). Of course, the vagina

is associated not only with penetration but with the issue

of menstrual blood: this is highlighted in Carter's

rewriting of the Grimms' fairy tale version of

'Cinderella, ' in the first part of 'Ashputtle: or the

Mother's Ghost, ' where the ugly sisters crush their

mutilated feet into a vagina-like slipper, 'an open

wound. '20 One need only look at the passage in The

Infernal Desire Machines describing the first in a set of

important exhibits in a peep show, which represents yet

another preview of Desiderio's quest throughout the novel,

to get an idea of the importance of the vagina (and the

vagina as a frame) as a symbol in this novel. The

description of this first exhibit, is entitled 'I HAVE

BEEN HERE BEFORE' and reads:

The legs raised and open as if ready

of a woman,
to admit a lover, formed a curvilinear triumphal
arch.... The dark red and purple crenellations
the acted as a frame for a
surrounding vagina
perfectly round hole through which the viewer
the luxuriant landscape of the
glimpsed moist,
interior.

Here endlessly receded before one's eyes a

miniature but irresistible vista of semi-
tropical forest where amazing fruits hung on the
trees
...

20 Mother's Ghost, ' in

Carter, 'Ashputtle: or the
the Village Voice Literary Supplement, March 1990, pp-22-
23 (p. 22).
Interpreting Desire 110

It seemed that winter and rough winds would

never -ouch these bright, oblivious regions or
ripple the surface of the lucid river which
wound a tranquil course down the central valley.
The eye of the beholder followed the course of
this river upwards towards the source, and so it
saw, for the first time, after some moments of
delighted lookigg, the misty battlements of a
(p. 44) I
castle.

The exhibit represents the journey which Desiderio will

take in search of Doctor Hoffman's castle, which lies,

symbolically, at the river's source. 'The legs, ' as the

other exhibits make clear, are Albertina's, between which

Desiderio desires to penetrate; the journey therefore, is

an erotic one, driven by the desire which Desiderio's name

signifies.

I would like to describe the complex relation between

centre and margin by looking at a specific and special

example of allusion at work in (or, indeed, not 'in') this

text--the novel's epigraphs. Epigraphs in general, like

all framing devices, have a double nature: they are both

outside and inside the novel which they head. The

epigraphs, then, are situated in The Infernal Desire

Machines's margins, on the 'outside, ' and as such they are

a part of it, and yet excluded from it--they are part of

the external frame which folds itself in to create a

21
This description inspires the illustration by
James marsh for the anatomically explicit cover of the
King Penguin 1985 edition.

Several
In Perceptions, Joseph imagines Mrs Boulder's
in this idealised 'He wanted to reach the
vagina way:
fountain forest deep inside her,
uncreated country of and
deep as the serene Beulah Land where Viv once slept
fleecily clad in Laguno down' (p. 119).
Interpreting Desire 111

centre. As part of the external frame, the epigraphs have

the authority to function as 'keys' to the novel's

contents, that is, it is their marginal positioning which

paradoxically enables the epigraphs to be read as central.

This, in turn, undermines the epigraph's apparent

authority since if they are read inside the novel, they

are subject to the context which it provides--which in

Carter's writing is usually the continual possibility of

irony. In this way, epigraphs function rather like the

Cretan Liar who announces that all Cretans lie.

Where, then, does the text begin, with the title or

on page one? Are the title and epigraphs supposed to be

read solely as if chosen by Angela Carter, which would

lend them a certain authority, or, since this novel is

represented as Desiderio's memoirs, are we to read them as

Desiderio's. choice, generated from inside the text, and

therefore to the ironies and uncertainties of the

subject

Whose for example, does the

narrative voice? perspective,

title represent? Who, that is, interprets Doctor

Hoffman's desire as 'infernal, ' rather than

machines

These unanswered by the text,

celestial? questions remain

but to further destabilise at first appears to

serve what

be distinction. It is also
a simple central/marginal

worth noting that both title and epigraphs appear

whilst

to be located in authority at the opening of

positions of

the the amongst the pages of

novel, epigraphs are situated

contents, dedication and preface, and are probably

Interpreting Desire 112

completely overlooked or ignored by some readers: this

increases their marginality.

What makes the epigraphs in The Infernal Desire

Machines so unusual is that they dramatise their own

double function and demonstrate one way in this
which

novel anticipates a reading procedure and includes it

among the objects it describes. This is just one example

of the excessive self-consciousness which makes Carter's

work so distinctive. It is the second and third epigraphs

which interest me here since they both account for the

reader's desire for a key to the contents of the novel,

whilst at the same time parodying this very desire. The

third epigraph is from Alfred Jarry's Exploits and

Opinions of Doctor Faustrall Pataphysician: 'Imagine the

perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost

his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork. '22 This

quotation identifies and mocks man's desire to name,

measure, and thereby control his surroundings. I am

careful to continue the clearly gendered nature of this

quotation in accordance with Jarry, and therefore with

Carter, since the notion of control and mastery of texts

has stereotypically been linked to a so-called 'masculine'

reading process. Part Carter's project, as I hope to

of

22 Jarry, edited by
In Selected Works of Alfred
Roger Shattuck Taylor, translated by
and Simon Watson
Taylor, (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 248. Jarry
defines 'Pataphysics' as 'the science of imaginary
solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of
objects, described by their virtuality, to their
lineaments' (p. 193).
Interpreting Desire 113

suggest, is to open up the possibility of alternative

modes of reading, which might be associated with the

'feminine' stereotype. The quotation from Jarry can be

interpreted as a timely warning to the reader, and as a

reflection upon reading conventions: it identifies the

reader's inevitable desire to grasp the so-called

'central' ideas which structure the text and yet mocks the

need to do so. Jarry situates his man outside--in the

margins of--time and space (like the epigraphs situated in

the margins of the novel) since this is where he would

have to be to measure them, but, of course, measurement

has become impossible. This prefigures Desiderio's

descriptions of several such situations in his story; for

example, during the course of the war, Hoffman dissolves

time and space, and his Ambassador explains to the

Minister and Desiderio that this is 'for the sake of

liberty':

Ambassador: The Doctor has liberated the

streets from the tyranny of directions and now
they can go anywhere they please. He also set
the timepieces free so that now they are
authentically pieces of time and can tell
everybody whatever time they like. I am
happy for the clocks. They used to
especially
have such innocent faces. They had the water-
melon munching, opaquely-eyed visages of slaves
and the Doctor has already proved himself a
horological Abraham Lincoln. (p. 33)

The second epigraph to Carter's novel is a quotation

from Wittgenstein, and presents a similar paradox:

(Remember that demand definitions

we sometimes
for but of their
the sake not of the content,
form. Our requirement is an architectural one:
the definition is a kind of ornamental coping
Interpreting Desire 114

that supports nothing. ) Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigations2

Wittgenstein maintains that we sometimes demand

definitions for their own sake, that is, as a formal or

conventional requirement. What we think we are seeking is

the fundamental structure or centre, but in fact the

'definition' that we arrive at, Wittgenstein claims, is an

ornamental coping, a decoration. That is, the definition,

like Jarry's measurement, is a margin, it surrounds what

appears to be the object or the concept. Its position of

marginality paradoxically lends it authority to promise

truth, yet simultaneously prevents any such thing because

it supports 'nothing. '

If we read all of the allusions to other texts in The

Infernal Desire Machines in terms of these quotations from

Jarry and Wittgenstein, the reader's desire to define--to

trace and identify source material--becomes part of the

search for the meaning or centre of the text, but this

meaning is revealed to be a 'conventional requirement' or

an 'ornamental coping'--a surround which appears to

function as a central support, but is only an illusion,

since there is nothing beyond or beneath the text. This

is not to undermine or trivialise the readers' requirement

or desire for definitions, keys to meaning, since the

or

conventions which govern our reading processes precisely

depend upon such a requirement and desire. As Linda

23
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1968), p. 85.
Interpreting Desire 115

Hutcheon has commented, 'The center may not hold, but it

is still an attractive fiction of order and unity' (A

24
Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 60). I would argue, indeed,

that this text encourages the reader to attempt to trace

allusions, but it simultaneously makes the reader aware of

such definitions as fiction, that is, as the products of

convention rather than as 'given' or irreducible centres.

This can also be described in terms of a theoretical

debate between two modes of reading which distinguish

literary 'allusion' from what has become known as

'intertextuality. ' The modes of reading are described in

the following passage from Roland Barthes's 'Theory of the

Text':

Whereas criticism hitherto unanimously

...
placed the emphasis on the finished 'fabric'
(the text being a 'veil' behind which the truth,
the in a word the 'meaning', had
real message,
to be sought), the current theory of the text
turns away from the text as veil and tries to
the fabric in its texture, in the
perceive 25
interlacing of codes, formulae and signifiers.

Barthes's first definition of criticism refers to a mode

upon 'allusions' functioning

of reading which would rely

to beneath the fabric of the text,

as pointers something

to help clarify its

a source or centre which will

24 Nights Circus on the the

Since she discusses at
following Hutcheon be quoting Carter
page, may well
is quoting W. B.
(Nights at the Circus, p. 117), who
cannot hold. '
Yeats's 'The Second Coming'--'the centre
See Chapter 1, page St, footnote 9.

25 the Text, ' in Untying

Roland Barthes, 'Theory of
the Text Reader, edited by Robert
A Post-Structuralist
Young (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 31-47
(P. 39).
Interpreting Desire 116

'meaning. ' 'Intertextuality, ' however, is a feature of

what Barthes calls 'the current theory of the text'; it

encompasses all references to other texts--'bits of codes,

formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages,

etc. ' ('Theory of the Text, ' p. 39)--and it serves to draw

the reader's attention to the linguistic fabrication of

the text itself. In so doing, it exposes as illusion the

notion, which sustains many readers of fiction, that there

is something beyond or beneath the text. As I have shown,

The Infernal Desire Machines simultaneously encourages

both of these incompatible modes of reading.

Carter's epigraphs describe and enact their own

invaginal procedure. They posit an interpretative key to

the 'truth, ' the 'real message' of the novel, whilst

simultaneously subverting this message, because the 'key'

they offer is one which denies the possibility of

achieving this truth. One more example of the self-

consciousness of this double gesture is that

Carter/Desiderio has kept Wittgenstein's parentheses round

his comment, thereby overtly signalling both its

its (since a parenthesis is both

marginality or centrality

an is a sentence). Thus, the

aside and embedded within

parentheses surround a comment which is both a definition

and definition hence invaginate the

yet no at all, and

invagination.
Interpreting Desire 117

IV

This process of invagination which the epigraphs act

out repeats itself throughout The Infernal Desire Machines

on every level, as the novel continually promises and yet

undermines every traditionally accepted centre, including

allusions, characters, narrative and plot (hence the

epigraphs do function as keys of a kind). At the same

time the text thematises the problems which this raises

for interpretation and includes the desires of its readers

among its very processes. Some of the difficulties

readers may have with this novel are acted out by the

first person narrator, Desiderio, the old man recalling

his youth and writing his memoirs. He explains:

I must gather together all that confusion of

experience and arrange it in order, just as it
happened, beginning at the beginning. I must
unravel my life as if it were so much knitting
and pick out from that tangle the single,
original thread of my self, the self who was a
hapFýned to become a hero and then
young man who
grew old. (p. 11)

Desiderio has been to pick out the central from the

asked

to interpret his story just as the

marginal, and record

reader attempts to interpret the text. This narrative

which Desiderio is 'as if it were so much

unravelling

knitting' Roland Barthes's descriptions of

recalls one of

26 The hero Sartre's novel Nausea

of Jean-Paul the
(1938) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) theorises about
difference between living and remembering experiences:
is far than life: 'I
memory, he finds, more manageable
to follow one another in an
wanted the moments of my life
You
orderly fashion like those of a life remembered.
try time by the tail' (p. 63).
might as well to catch
Interpreting Desire 118

reading: 'Everything is to be disentangled, nothing

deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the

thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level,

but there is nothing beneath. '27 Barthes's point, of

course, is to deny that there is a 'single original

thread, ' and this reinforces the irony of Desiderio's

statement. Carter's novel may also be alluding to

Marlow's yarns in Joseph Conrad's Heart 28

of Darkness.

Carter's novel self-consciously acknowledges the

analogy between Desiderio reading/writing his own story

and the reader reading the text when Desiderio addresses

ironic comments about his narrative to the reader (a

convention, of course, of the retrospective account of

one's life). For example, when he admits killing Doctor

Hoffman before it happens chronologically within his

story--giving us, as David Punter puts it, 'the conclusion

of the story ahead of its "natural" place' ('Angela

Carter: Supersessions of the Masculine, ' p. 211)--he

remarks: 'But there I go again--running ahead of myself!

See, I have ruined all the suspense. I have quite spoilt

my climax. But why do you deserve a climax, anyway? '

(p. 208). 29 he has killed Hoffman, struggled

Later, when

27 Author, ' in
Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the
Image-Music-Text (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142-48
(p. 147).

28 Darkness (Harmondsworth:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Penguin, 1973), p. 8.
29 Punter's
This passage is the origin of David
'premature Both the quotation from
ejaculation' metaphor.
The Infernal Desire Machines, and Punter's commentary
Interpreting Desire 119

with and murdered Albertina, and dramatically smashed up

the Doctor's desire machines, he escapes easily from the

laboratory (too easily, he thinks, for a 'hero'). This

dramatic scene is described in a mixture of gothic and

James Bond-like adventure discourses, over-stuffed with

adjectives and riddled with alliteration. The following

is a typical passage:

I ran down that ice warren of white, glittering

corridors, found the laboratory, went in,
smashed the dancing screens with the desk,
dragged pipes and wires from the walls and set
fire to -he papers with my gold cigarette
lighter. It was the work of moments. (p. 218)

His disappointment with the ease of the destruction and

his escape is heralded by the last, and typically

Carteresque, throw-away sentence, 'It was the work of

moments, ' which seems to empty out the meaning and drain

the from 30 The deflation

energy the previous description.

experienced in the past, at the time of the exploit, is

therefore repeated in the present, is experienced once

more as narrative deflation. Furthermore, Desiderio draws

recall Tristram's self-referentiality in Laurence Sterne's

Tristram Shandy (New York: Norton, 1980), although
Tristram's problem is not running ahead of himself but,
rather, keeping up with himself.
30 is Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This a technique which
uses several times in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
When, for example, Jose Arcadio Buendia sends details of
important experiments to the government, we are told:

He sent it by a messenger who crossed the

...
mountains, got lost in measureless swamps,
forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of
perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and
beasts he found a route that joined
wild until
the one used by the that carried the mail.
mules
(pp. 10-11)
Interpreting Desire 120

an explicit analogy between himself and the

reader--between his expectations of himself and what he

assumes are the reader's expectations of a dramatic

narrative. Hence, his sense of deflation at the ease of

his escape is dramatised not only at the level of

narrative, but also commented upon: 'If you feel a

certain sense of anticlimax, how do you think I felt? '

(p. 218).

The relationship between the reader and Desiderio,

like the relationship between the reader and Walser in

Nights at the Circus, is not a simple allegory since, once

again, the authority of the apparent guide is questioned.

In The Infernal Desire Machines, the older Desiderio seems

to function as an observer in the margins of the text with

the authority of detachment and of age to offer

metalinguistic commentary on the story of his younger

self. He tries to differentiate between the two 'I's' in

his story: 'I was a great hero in my time though now I am

an old man and no longer the "I" of my own story and my

time is past' (p. 14); but the older and younger

Desiderios--the two 'I's' of the text--relate invaginally:

the older frames the younger, and yet the older's

narrative is to, indeed it is, the story of the

central

younger. Therefore, both 'I's' are revealed to be part of

the same construction. Put another way, just as old

Desiderio is the his life, so this

writing story of

is his hence he is
narrative also the story of writing;

but is by, the text,

producing, simultaneously produced
Interpreting Desire 121

and therefore can have no detached, authoritative

position. Personal identity appears to be beyond or

before the text but is also shown to be part the text's
of

very processes: it is both inside and outside the

at same

time. 31

Some examples will make this process of questioning

the so-called 'central' narrator clearer. The opening

words of the novel disrupt any confidence the reader might

wish to have in a narrator and immediately establish an

ironic tone:

I remember everything.

Yes.

I remember everything perfectly. (p. 11)

But in case the reader has missed the initial irony here

Desiderio then admits that he is constructing his story

out of everything he can recall. It is, he claims, a

story concocted from a variety of disparate and less than

reliable sources: from a straightened-out version of his

own memories; from literature; from what he calls 'the

31 to describe the
Umberto Eco uses a similar model
relations between the younger and older Adsos in The Name
of the Rose (1980) (London: Picador, 1984). In his
commentary on his own novel, Reflections on 'The Name of
the Rose' (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), he
writes:

Adso, at the age of eighty, is telling about

Who is
what he saw at the age of eighteen.
speaking, the eighteen-year-old Adso or the
Both, and this is
eighty-year-old? obviously;
deliberate. The trick was to make the old Adso
constantly present as he ponders what he
remembers having seen and felt as the young
Adso.
Interpreting Desire 122

history books' (p. 14); and from popular myth ('they told

me later, when I became a hero, how I had saved mankind'

(p. 11)). This admission of the diverse components of his

narrative is punctuated regularly by the refrain, 'I

remember everything. ' Throughout the rest of the novel

the reader is continually reminded of this process of

'bricolage' from which the older Desiderio self-

consciously constructs his narrative, which, of course,

constructs his past and present self. He is, for

instance, unsure about the relationship between memory and

the creative imagination, and he is suspicious that the

scenes he describes might be constructed out of his own

fancy. For example, when Desiderio is rescued by the

Doctor's mercenaries he describes their base: 'We landed

in a helicopter port inside the fort itself, which I

believe I had once seen in a film of the Foreign Legion'

(p. 195). And when Desiderio sees Hoffman's laboratory he

says:

I think I must have imagined some, at least, of

the decor I found in the room for it satisfied
my imagination so fully I was half suspicious
It was half Rottwang's laboratory in Lang's
... Dr
Metropolis but it was also the cabinet of
Caligari. (p. 204)

He describes the 'decor' of the Doctor's laboratory as a

combination two twentieth-century films which are

of early

both renowned for their concern with decoration rather

than The Cabinet Dr Caligari, like Carter's

plot. of

novel, experiments with the notion of an unstable

frame, the thinks the hero

narrative where audience
Interpreting Desire 123

reliable until the final scene reveals him to be an inmate

of an insane asylum. Desiderio's narrative cannot

distinguish between what is recalled from 'literature' or

'film' or any other quotable medium, and what is recalled

from 'life, ' since the text exposes what we call fact as

constructed in the same way as what we call fiction and

shows, again, like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that

what we call history has much in common with what we call

story. Hence Desiderio's narrative, which appeared to be

a metalinguistic commentary upon, or frame around, the

story of his younger self, both posits and simultaneously

questions its own interpretative status.

Desiderio's invaginal relationship with his story

thematises the reader's relationship with the text. Just

as Desiderio frames his story, so readers, in the act of

interpretation, frame the text, and hence are both

marginal inside; the reader is

and central, outside and

always in 'an external position from which to elucidate

the whole in [she or he] also figures. '32 David

which

Punter how implicated in

points out readers are explicitly

The Infernal Desire Machines, indeed, how Desiderio writes

us into his script in the 'Introduction' (see,

32
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and
Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1983), p. 199.
Interpreting Desire 124

particularly, p. 14): he describes the 'Introduction'

section as a 'mutual fiction of the later course of the

world which Desiderio weaves around himself and the

reader, ' which implies that 'we are supposed already to

know the outcome of the story through history books'

('Angela Carter: Supersessions of the Masculine, ' p. 211).

Developing this, I want to suggest that readers of The

Infernal Desire Machines are in an invaginal relationship

with a text which requires that they try to interpret

invagination. The text, once again, anticipates this

predicament by including figures for these reading

procedures amongst the objects it describes. For example,

before he leaves the city Desiderio describes how he and

his fellow citizens of 'The City Under Siege' have to

orientate themselves in a city full of illusions--just as

the reader is trying to interpret a text full of

allusions:

We did our best to keep what was outside, out,

and what was inside, in But, if the city was
... inside the
in a state of siege, the enemy was
barricades, and lived in the minds of each of
us. (p. 12)

Both inside at the same time, such illusions

and outside

prevent Desiderio and his fellows from adopting any

detached from to observe what is happening

position which

in inside to be a citizen, is
the city. To live the city,

to be involved in the disturbing processes which construct

it. This is figure for the situation of

an appropriate

the find secure place from

reader of this text, who can no
Interpreting Desire 125

which to interpret, only the continual that

suggestion

there might be such a position.

The reader searching for the elusive meaning, or

centre, of the text resembles Desiderio pursuing

Albertina, whom he calls his 'Platonic other, ' his 'dream

made flesh' (p. 215). Just as Walser in Nights at the

Circus seeks not only to penetrate Fevvers's story and her

clothes to discover the 'essential' Fevvers beneath (to

see her body and also, symbolically, to master her

sexually by penetrating to the symbolic 'centre' of her

body), so the young Desiderio is driven by his desire for

Albertina, which is a desire to penetrate her. As we have

seen, Desiderio's journey towards Doctor Hoffman's castle

was represented early in the novel by the very act of

(visual) penetration of Hoffman's daughter (in exhibit 1

at the peep-show) The sexual act, however, is one which

.
Albertina continually promises-- '110h, Desiderio, soon!

soon! "' and yet continually defers--'"Don't you see it's

quite out of the question, at the moment? "' (p. 204). This

serves as an eroticisation of the mode of reading which

seeks to penetrate behind the surface of the text, or

which journeys through the novel expecting to be rewarded

with the key to its Desiderio both believes in

meaning.

Albertina, that for him 'the earth turned on the

claiming

her (p. 136), knows that she is a

pivot of mouth' yet also

construct of this very desire, since 'all the time she

kissed [him] had been born of nothing but

she only a ghost

[his] longing' (p. 140). Albertina is like the mechanical

Interpreting Desire 126

doll in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' is brought

who

to life by the hero's desire, 33

except in this case the

'heroine' knows her situation: '"All the time you have

known me, I've been maintained in my various appearances

only by the power of your desire"' (p. 204).

The 'centres' described in this novel, therefore,

like those in Nights at the Circus, do not 'hold. '

Desiderio fulfils part of his quest and gains entrance

into Hoffman's castle to the source of the illusions, only

to be, literally, disillusioned. 34 illusions

There are no

within the castle, because Doctor Hoffman, like Prospero

in Shakespeare's The Tempest, is immune from the effects

he creates:

Ironically enough, one could not judge the

Prospero effect in his own castle for he could
not alter the constituent of the aromatic coffee
we sipped by so much as an iota.... I had wanted
his house to be a palace dedicated only to
wonder. (p. 200)

33 translated by R. J.
Tales of Hoffmann,
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 85-125.

34 invokes Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Carter clearly
by using the, by now, famous image of a nut and kernel,
than the
which stresses the importance of the shell rather
centre:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,

the lies within the shell
whole meaning of which
But Marlow was not typical
of a cracked nut.
to him the meaning of an episode was not
... the
inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping
tale. (p. 8)

When Desiderio finally sees the location of Doctor

Hoffman's he describes it as 'a sweet, female
castle
kernel nestling in the core of the virile, thrusting rock'
(p. 196).
Interpreting Desire 127

Like the characters in The Wizard of oz who finally meet

the wizard, Desiderio realises that he has travelled

beyond the possibilities of wonder to the very processes

which create the illusions:

My disillusionment was profound. I was not in

the domain of the marvellous at all. I had gone
far beyond that and at last I had reached the
powerhouse of the marvellous, where all its
clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept.
(p. 201)

Hoffman himself, at the very heart of his castle, is

similarly empty. 'He was stillness. He seemed to have

refined himself almost to nothing. He was a grey ghost

sitting in a striped coat at a very elegant table'

(p. 200). Doctor Hoffman's coat, like Buffo the clown's

make-up in Nights at the Circus, appears to have nothing

beneath it, only 'an absence. A vacancy' (Nights at the

Circus, p. 122). Desiderio fears that fulfilling his

'quest' with Albertina will prove equally unsatisfactory:

'I was already wondering whether the fleshly possession of

Albertina would not be the greatest disillusionment of

all' (p. 201). He, of course, kills her before this

particular 'anticlimax' can take place, thus denying what

he calls 'his proper destination' (p. 220).

However, the time as it exposes the illusory

at same

nature these 'centres, ' the novel also stresses the

of

importance the desire for such illusions. Life without

of

desire, Desiderio finds, is life without direction and

'everybody is relatively
without a driving force, where

contented because they do know how to name their

not
Interpreting Desire 128

desires so the desires do not exist' (p. 207). Desiderio,

however, is not contented because he remembers the object

of his desire. Desiderio believes he will never see

Albertina again:

I identified at last the flavour of my daily

bread; it was and would be that of regret. Not,
you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that
insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that
the impossible is, per se, impossible. (p. 221)

But he also believes no such thing, and writes his memoirs

in an attempt to reincarnate, or reconstruct, by

reinterpreting, Albertina, and his memoirs are motivated

by the desire for her which was never satisfied but was

also never destroyed by disillusionment. She, therefore,

is both inside and outside, the product and the addressee

of his writing, and, symbolically, the memoirs are

dedicated to her (where the dedication itself functions as

both a frame and a centre):

I, Desiderio, dedicate all my memories

to

Albertina Hoffman

my insatiable tears. (p. 14)

with

For Desiderio there be compromise between believing

can no

and not believing in his 'centre, ' only a radical

undecidability which motivates the process of writing.

Albertina's imminent at the end of the novel--the

presence

(p. 221)--marks the

last words are, 'Unbidden, she comes'

(since there is now no reason to write) and

end of writing

Desiderio's death, since she is his 'necessary extinction'

(p. 215): 'What fat book to coffin young Desiderio'

a
Interpreting Desire 129

(p. 221). The 'she, ' may of course not refer to Albertina

at all, but to death itself, or, more likely, the two are

synonymous. The sexual connotations of 'she comes, ' also

suggests a final consummation of the sexual act for which

Desiderio has been longing, though of course, it is she

and not he, who 'comes. '

Desiderio's journey towards Albertina in this novel

is complemented by a parallel sub-plot, in 'The Erotic

Traveller' section, which recounts the story of the Count,

a parodic figure who represents, Elaine Jordan explains, a

combination of 'Sade and Nietzsche, dressed up as Dracula'

('Enthralment, ' p. 34). The Count journeys toward his

centre: this is a journey, like Desiderio's, which is

towards both another character but also towards himself.

Like the reader journeying through the novel, drawn on by

the promise of centres but aware of these centres as

constructs, the Count gravitates towards, and yet flees

from, a negative image of himself. This other self takes

the form of a black pimp who pursues the Count after he

strangles in New Orleans, and whom the Count

a prostitute

knows is his When they finally come face to

own creation.

face the Count to the pimp (alluding to T. S.

complains

Eliot and Baudelaire35): '"You are my only destination

35 'The Waste Land, ' Collected Poems

T. S. Eliot,
1909-1962 1963), p. 65: 'You!
(London: Faber and Faber,
hypocrite frere! ' Eliot is
lecteur! --mon semblable--mon
Baudelaire from Les Fleurs du Mal. Carter has
quoting
this in her short story The Quilt
also used quotation
Maker, ' where she feminises it to, 'ma semblable, ma
(in Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction with a Twist,
soeur'
 Interpreting Desire
130

You altered my compass so that it

... would point only to

you, my hypocritical shadow, my double, my brother"'

(p. 159). It is the sheer force the Count's
of

simultaneous belief and yet disbelief in himself (the

disbelief is materialised as a belief in his negative

self) which motivates his travelling. The Count, like

Desiderio, finally meets his own his

centre, own negative

self (though the roles of negative become

and positive
interchangeable), and these two selves annihilate one

another. The meeting, then, is annihilatory, but is

what
important, as the Count had always the
maintained, was
journey towards such a meeting: 'The journey is
alone

(p. 123). 36
real'

The novel, then, continually encourages the reader to

search for the centres which it exposes as constructions,

teasing the reader with parodic versions of her or his own

desires. The Minister describes what Doctor Hoffman has

done to the city and, I would argue, what Carter has done

to the text:

Minister: All he has done is to find some means

of bewitching the intelligence. He has only
induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As
in the early days of the cinema, all the
citizens are jumping through the screen to lay
their hands on the naked lady in the bath-tub!
(p. 36)

edited by Jeanette Winterson (London: Pandora, 1986),

pp. 117-138 (p. 137)).
36 Carter have
Two figures in other novels by
adopted a similar motto. Morris in Shadow Dance (p. 36),
and Fevvers in Nights at the Circus (p. 279) both appear to
believe that 'To travel hopefully is better than to
arrive. '
Interpreting Desire 131

Like the bewitched citizens of the city, readers of The

Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman are encouraged

to leap through the surface of the text to lay their hands

on the naked truth which supposedly lies behind it (a

further indication of the eroticisation of the reading

process). The readers' invaginal relation to the text

positions them as both marginal and central,

simultaneously believing and not believing in centres.

And it is this radical 'suspension of disbelief' (where

'radical' does not suggest something which is complete or

irreversible, but, rather, something which is irreducibly

oxymoronic) which creates an insatiable desire for an

elusive centre, which, in turn, motivates a potentially

endless process of interpretation. The end of Desiderio's

writing is both marked, and simultaneously brought about,

by a reprieve, a consummation, and death; the novel

suggests, however, that there is no such satisfaction or

termination for the reader: '"Nothing, " said the peepshow

"is it only changes"' (p. 99).

proprietor, ever completed;

The Infernal Desire Machines uses the invaginal model

to undercut all attempts to master the text: all

attempts--and the gendered metaphors are apposite--at what

might be 'phallic' reading. It uses a model of

called a

invagination to the impossibility of, yet the

show

inescapable Therefore, in so
desire for, such a reading.

far to a key to reading this

as y reading appears offer

it is but in far as it enacts the

novel, phallic; so
Interpreting Desire 132

unmasterability of the text, it offers still another

example of the invaginal relation between text.

reader and

All of Carter's novels offer similar, if sometimes

less explicit, challenges to reading conventions. The

coherence of her work since her first publication cannot

simply be explained in terms of any one linear or organic

model, but some features remain constant--such as her

obsessive eclecticism and the resulting wealth of

intertextual allusions; the revaluing and superimposition

of 'sub-genres'; the mingling and counterpointing of

realist detail and disturbing fantasies; the exploration

of notions of identity and gender as social constructs;

and especially, in connection with all of the above, a

self-reflexive fascination with the problems of

interpretation. All of her novels seem to me to explore

the possibilities of, and open up, what I shall refer to

as an alternative and productive 'reading space, ' which

promotes new ways of reading intimately linked with and

yet subversive of familiar conventions. The spatial

metaphor is both inspired by, and also describes, the

vagina and has characterised this

vaginal space which

However, these modes of reading do

chapter. alternative

the in this case, the feminine,

not simply shift marginal,

to the centre; rather, they make use of the

doubled positioning to
central/marginal's paradoxical and

challenge of both genders and their

accepted notions

hierarchical relationship. Furthermore, Carter's use of

Interpreting Desire 133

this body metaphor can be read as part of her own

discourse of gender bending: it allows her fiction to

celebrate femininity, and yet at the same time

demythologises any notion of an essence upon which a such

celebration depends. Chapters 4 and 6 will discuss the

ways in which Carter's fiction both exploits and explodes

patriarchal appropriation of the female body. The vagina

and vaginal space closely resemble the circus ring in

Nights at the Circus where both the performing space and

the audience which surround it are equally important,

reversible, and mutually dependent. Throughout the

remainder of this thesis, I will be attempting to describe

how Carter's novels open up such a 'reading space, '

although, since it is generated simultaneously inside and

outside the texts, it remains ungraspable--one might even

say illusory. This is perhaps one reason why academic

critics have such difficulty writing about or placing

Carter's work.
 CHAPTER 3

THE CHARACTER OF ANGELA CARTER'S 'CHARACTERS': 'THE MAGIC

TOYSHOP, ' 'HEROES AND VILLAINS, ' 'LOVE, ' AND 'THE PASSION

OF NEW EVE'

When reading a novel, or writing one for that

matter, we maintain a double consciousness of
the characters as both, as it were, real and
fictitious, free and determined, and know that
however absorbing and convincing we may find it,
it is not the only story we shall want to read
(or, as the case may be, write) but part of an
endless sequence of stories by which man has
sought and will always seek to make sense of
life. And death.

David Lodge'

'Your survival as a character and mine as an

author depend upon us seducing a living soul
into our printed world and trapping it here long
enough for us to steal the imaginative energy
which gives us life. '

Alistair Gray2

The essence of naturalist fiction is

plausibility; in order to create the willing
suspension of disbelief, the writer is forced to
allot his or her characters lives that are the
most plausible, not the most like life, which,
since it is not the product of the human
imagination, holds infinite surprises.

Angela Carter3

1 Can You Go (Harmondsworth:

David Lodge, How Far
Penguin, 1981), p. 240.
2 in Alistair Gray's
Naster's speech to Lanark
Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981) (London: Granada,
1982), p. 485.
3 to Love (revised
Angela Carter, 'Afterword'
edition), p. 116.
Characters 135

Carter's fictional texts, like Helene Cixous's

theoretical text, 'The Character of "Character", ' ask and

develop the question, 'What does "character" name? '4 This

is a question which has not yet received a great deal of

discussion amongst literary theorists of the present

generation; Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, for example, points

out that 'the elaboration of a systematic non-reductive

but also non-impressionistic theory of character remains

one of the challenges poetics has not yet met. '5 The term

'character' usually defines those personages whose 'lives'

the text describes, who appear to exist before and beyond

the boundaries of the text, and who are therefore in some

way knowable. Many readers rely upon this notion of

character as a stable and reassuring reference by which to

orientate themselves through a novel and by which they are

confirmed in their own sense of a secure self-identity.

He1ene Cixous writes:

By definition, a 'character, ' preconceived or

created by an author, is to be figured out,
understood, read: he is presented, offered up
to interpretation, with the prospect of a
traditional reading that seeks its satisfaction
at the level of a potential identification with
such and such a 'personage. ' ('The Character of
"Character, "' p. 385).

The 'traditional is inheritance from the kind

reading' an

of nineteenth-century 'realist' novel Henry James

4 Character of "Character, "' in

Helene Cixous, 'The
New Literary History, 5 (1974), 383-402 (p. 383).
pp.

5
Shlomith Narrative Fiction:
Rimmon-Kennan,
Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 29.
Characters 136

describes as seeking a 'direct impression of life. '6 The

ultimate realist premise would be a one-to-one

correspondence between literature and reality, though,

George Levine maintains,

no major Victorian novelists were deluded into

believing that they were in fact offering an
unmediated reality; but all of them struggled to
make contact with the world out there, and, even
with their knowledge of their own subjectivity,
to break from the threatening limits of
solipsism, of convention, and of language.?

The aim of realist novelists, then, was to produce the

illusion of reality, and to convince their readers that

this was a reading of life. Levine maintains that realism

'implies an attempt to use language to get beyond

language, to discover some non-verbal truth out there'

(The Realistic Imagination, p. 6). To 'get beyond

language, ' therefore, the realist text had to deny its

very status as representation, and therefore deny the

material nature of the text as marks on a page, and the

6 'The Fiction, ' in The Critical

Henry James, Art of
Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited
by David H. Richter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989),
pp. 422-33 (p. 425). The term 'realist' is used here to
describe the work of a number of novelists in the
nineteenth (and since). I am using the term in
century
full consciousness of its reductiveness: clearly the
output of nineteenth-century novelists was far more varied
and innovative than could be encapsulated in a single
adjective. However, the term as a shorthand for
can stand
a set of assumptions the aims of novelists and the
about
practices in varying degrees
of readers which were shared
in this period, and also underlie most popular fiction
today. (My use of the past tense should not be taken to
that fiction is mode in
suggest realistic not a widespread
the present. )
7 George Levine, Imagination: English
The Realistic
Fiction From Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 8.
Characters 137

status of the narrative as conventionalised articulation,

in order 'to let the identity of things shine through the

window of words. '8

The nineteenth-century realist novel tended to place

character at the centre of meaning. It focused upon the

'individual experience rather than collective tradition as

the "ultimate arbiter of reality"'9 in its attempt to

depict the lives of ordinary people rather than an

idealised or conventionalised version of events; but it

refused to acknowledge the conventionality of such a

strategy. Levine suggests that such a 'refusal' was

'essential to the convention itself. It supported the

special authenticity the realist novel claimed by

emphasising its primary allegiance to experience over art'

(The Realist Imagination, pp. 17-18). For example, George

Eliot's insistence both in and out of her novels that she

was inclined towards the creation of imperfect characters

is well known; she deliberately chose to create anti-

romantic and anti-heroic characters, stressing the

importance of the ordinary, thereby inviting readers to

regard her fiction as more 'real' than that of her

predecessors.

8 Colin Essays: Film,

MacCabe, Theoretical
linguistics, literature (Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 1985), p. 35.
9 Ian Watt, the Novel: Studies in
The Rise of
Defoe, Richardson Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
and
1963), p. 15.
Characters 138

The realist tradition is closely related to the

novelist's sense of audience, since by portraying a

personal and individual experience of life, the novel

invites its readers to treat the characters as living

than textual 10 Such

people rather as constructions. a

reading, Helene Cixous claims, 'leads one to assume a

"depth, " a truth that is hidden but discoverable' ('The

Character of "Character, "' p. 385). Derek Attridge, in an

article entitled 'Joyce and the Ideology of Character, '

comments upon the reading conventions which enable us to

achieve such a transcendental reading:

As readers conversant with a given literary

tradition at a given moment in history (in which
the realist novel continues to play a dominant
role), we deploy a battery of interpretive
techniques to produce characters as we read, but
in order for these techniques to be effective,
they must be occluded in an illusory experiencTi
of unmediated access to knowable human nature.

Many realist novelists, then, attempted to reflect upon

the world by presenting the reader with what appeared to

10
In The Realistic Imagination, Levine argues that
the Victorian 'share a faith that the
major novelists
realist's exploration will reveal a comprehensive
Its to may be mediated by
world.... relation reality
consciousness, but it is authenticated by the appeal of
consciousness to the shared consciousness of the community
of readers' (p. 18).

11 'Joyce the Ideology of

Derek Attridge, and
Character, ' in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, edited
by Bernard Benstock (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1988), 152-57 (p. 153). In. The Realistic Imagination,
pp.
George Levine maintains:

The history of English realism obviously

depended in large on changing notions of
measure
how best to 'represent'
what is 'out there, ' of
is
it, and of whether, after all, representation
knowable. (p. 6)
possible or the 'out there'
Characters 139

be 'unmediated access' to the truths of human nature. The

power this illusion generates, George Levine maintains,

resides in both 'a pleasure in knowing life, and a

pleasure in the power to seduce an audience into believing

it has seen life too' (The Realistic Imagination, p. 21).

Henry James points out the difficulties of producing even

the most momentary illusion, but then goes on to claim

that to break such an illusion constitutes 'a betrayal of

a sacred office, ' and 'a terrible crime':

Certain accomplished novelists have a habit of

giving themselves away which must often bring
tears to the eyes of people who take their
fiction seriously. I was lately struck, in
reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope,
with his want of discretion in this particular.
In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he
concedes to the reader that he and his trusting
friend are only 'making believe. ' He admits
that the events he narrates have not really
happened, and that he can give his narrative any
turn the reader may like best. ('The Art of
Fiction, ' pp. 423-24)

This chapter analyses the ways in which Angela

Carter's work, while exploiting all the 'traditional'

resonances of character, exposes and challenges reading

and looks at how

conventions which promote such a reading,

four of Carter's novels examine and redefine what

character 'names. '12 The issues raised here are, to some

degree, common to all of Carter's fiction, and I have

chosen to look at several quite early novels, The Magic

12 discontinue the inverted commas around

I shall
the but they can be assumed throughout my
word character,
text I am referring to the myth of character, since
when
this term, and what it signifies, is in question.
Characters 140

Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, and Love, in the first three

sections; this is followed by an analysis of the function

of names in The Passion of New Eve in Section IV. Section

V considers the position of the reader in relation to the

construction of character across Carter's work as it both

'uses and abuses, '13 does not dispense with but exposes, a

realist notion of character. Also important in terms of

Carter's fiction, are the ways in which her novels expose

and use idealised notions of the realist novel which have

filtered into popular fiction (including the 'Mills and

Boon' variety) and classic Hollywood narratives. In

effect, her novels superimpose techniques which have been

described as realist upon both the more self-conscious

eighteenth-century techniques (allusions to Fielding,

Sterne and Swift recur frequently in Carter's work) and

also upon twentieth-century modernist techniques which

14 They
decentre and destabilise the notion of character.

do this in order to capitalise upon the reader's desire

13Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism:

History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
'Uses and abuses' is a catch phrase Hutcheon uses
throughout her text: 'Postmodernism, ' she claims, 'is a
contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses,
installs the very concepts it
and then subverts,
challenges' (p. 3).
14 the term 'modernist' in the commonly
I am using
to the techniques of Joyce,
accepted sense, as referring
(Though this involves
Pound, Eliot and Stein. of course,
immense simplifications. ) For readings of modernist
for example, Attridge,
experiments with character, see,
'Joyce Character, ' pp. 152-57, and
and the Ideology of
Daniel Ferrer, 'Characters in Ulysses: '"The Featureful
Perfection "' 148-51, in James Joyce:
of Imperfection, pp.
The Augmented Ninth.
Characters 141

for a transcendental reading where characters appear

knowable, yet simultaneously subvert the very process of

15 Linda Hutcheon's
recognition. definition of

postmodernism neatly describes this process:

What postmodernism does is to denaturalise both

realism's transparency and modernism's reflexive
response, while retaining (in its typically
complicitous critical wy) the historically
attested power of both. b

Typically, Carter's fiction self-consciously dramatises

the ways in which character is, and has been, both written

into and read into a text; and, in the course of this

process, it also raises many questions about what Helene

Cixous has called 'the nature of fiction' ('The Character

of "Character, "' p. 383). Cixous maintains that we use the

same fictional codes, the same reading conventions, to

read life and fictional texts; that is, we read ourselves

and other people in the same way as we read character, and

vice versa. Vladimir Nabokov makes this point

brilliantly, via Humbert Humbert, in Lolita (ironically,

of course, since Humbert Humbert is himself a self-

15 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, in her chapter 'Story:

characterisations, ' in Narrative Fiction, suggests a
similar in to develop 'an integrated theory
strategy order
of character' (p. 42). She outlines the incompatibility of
what she calls 'mimetic theories (i. e. theories which
consider literature in some sense, an imitation of
as,
[where] with people, ' and
reality) characters are equated
'semiotic [where] they dissolve into textuality, '
theories
and asks 'should the study of character be abandoned, or
should both approaches be rejected and a different
Can reconcile the
perspective sought? such a perspective
two opposed positions without "destroying" character
between them' (p. 33).
16 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism
(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 34.
Characters 142

consciously constructed fictional character who addresses

the readers saying, 'Imagine me; I shall not exist if you

imagine 17 'I have

do not me'). often noticed, ' he says,

that we are inclined to endow our friends with

the stability of type that literary characters
acquire in the reader's mind.... Whatever
evolution this or that popular character has
gone through between the book covers, his fate
is fixed, in our minds, and, similarly, we
expect our friends to follow this or that
logical and conventional pattern we have fixed
for them. (p. 279)

Cixous argues that by demystifying the notion of

character, which Nabokov's irony does so beautifully,

the question of the nature of fiction comes to

the fore, as well as the examination of
subjectivity--through fiction, in fiction, and
as fiction: where the term 'fiction' should not
be taken simply as part of a pair of
...
opposites, which would make it the contrary of
'reality. ' ('The Character of "Character, "'
p. 383. )

To question the notion of character, therefore, is also to

question and disrupt the way we read and construct

ourselves and others.

How, then, does Carter explore the notion of

character in The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and villains and

Love? On one level, it is possible to read the

almost

characters in these as if they were knowable,

novels

17 Nabokov, Lolita (1959) (London: Corgi,

Vladimir
1961), p. 136.
Characters 143

'living characters in 18:

... significant relationships'

it is therefore almost possible to relate to them, and

also to relate their stories (though, as I have already

pointed out, summaries of Carter's novels are notoriously

difficult). The Magic Toyshop is Carter's second novel,

published in 1967. It is the story of a fifteen-year-old

girl, Melanie, and her younger brother and sister, whose

comfortable middle-class life is suddenly shattered when

their parents are killed in a plane crash and they are

adopted by their toymaker uncle who lives in a seedy

London suburb. The sudden shift of location includes a

whole change of lifestyle for the children, and, as one

reviewer comments, 'the shock is well conveyed of the

physical change from hot daily baths and middle-class

cosseting to the burping geyser and not a book in the

house' (Times Literary Supplement, 6 July 1967, p. 593).

Uncle Philip is the archetypal demon puppeteer whose odd

creations and life-size puppets command all of his

affection he abuses the rest of the household. This

while

household consists of his Irish wife Margaret, who was

struck dumb on her wedding day; her brothers Finn, a

Francie, They are joined by

painter, and a musician-19

18 See T. S. Eliot's introduction to Djuna Barnes's

novel, Nightwood (1937), (New York: New Directions,
1961). Eliot is attempting to classify Nightwood, and
that 'unless the term "novel" has become too
explains
debased if it a book in which living
to apply, and means
characters are created and shown in significant
relationships, this book is a novel' (pp. xi-xii).

19 Aunt Margaret the flute, with Francie on

plays
fiddle the and dancing (pp. 49-52).
and Finn playing spoons
Characters 144

Melanie and her brother Jonathon, who works for his uncle
building model ships, and their baby sister Victoria. The

plot is constructed around Melanie's attempts to define

and redefine herself as she copes with the tragedy of her

parents' death, her own adolescence and awakening

sexuality, and her growing relationship with the Irish

trio, who dance and play music, like toys in a deserted

nursery, when Philip is away. Melanie gradually and

unwillingly falls in love with Finn, her reluctance

stemming partly from the fact that Finn bears no

resemblance to the 'phantom bridegroom' of her fantasies

(generated by reading women's magazines belonging Mrs

Rundle, her parents' house-keeper).

Heroes and Villains was published just two years

later, in 1969. It is set in the future, in the aftermath

of a world war, where the survivors are grouped into three

classes, Professors, Barbarians and Out People. The last

class are outcasts from humanity, they are 'wilder than

beasts' (p. 54), and their bodies show the most overt signs

of the effects of war: their 'human form [had] acquired

fantastic shapes.... Few had the conventional complement

of limbs or features and most bore marks of nameless

diseases' (p. 110); they haunt the margins of both the

professorial barbarian camps, and hence haunt the

and

the Marianne, the heroine, is a history

margins of story.

professor's daughter, who belongs to a community of

There is also an Irish woman called Maggie, who plays a

tin in a band, in Carter's earlier novel, Several
whistle
Perceptions.
Characters 145

scholars, farmers and soldiers who live a disciplined and

heavily ritualised life within a steel and concrete

settlement surrounded by 'a stout wall topped with barbed

wire' (p. 3). There are different Barbarian tribes, who

make regular raids on her settlement for supplies and who

fascinate Marianne--'she liked the wild, quatrosyllabic

lilt of the word, Barbarian' (p. 4)--especially after one

of them kills her brother as she looks on. Marianne's

mother subsequently dies from grief, and some years later

Marianne is made an orphan (like Melanie), when 'in a fit

of senile frenzy, the old nurse killed her father with an

axe and then poisoned herself with some stuff she used for

cleaning brasses' (p. 15). Marianne, always a rebel,

defects from the claustrophobic confines of her community

when she helps a Barbarian--Jewel--escape, and finds

herself swept away with him. The shift from the

Professors' community to the harsh life among the

Barbarians also recalls the shift of location in The Magic

Toyshop. Marianne is shocked by the change of culture and

by the poverty and ignorance of the Barbarians, and after

a failed attempt to escape, she is even more shocked to

find herself first by Jewel and subsequently forced

raped

to him. Marianne Jewel's marriage ceremony is

marry and
20
concocted and presided over by Doctor F. R. Donally, a

fellow professorial exile, Jewel's 'tutor, ' and self-

This20 be to Dr F. R. Leavis,
may a sly allusion
whose dominance in the field of literary criticism
coincided with Carter's student years.
Characters 146

appointed ruler over the Barbarian tribe. Marianne

becomes more attached to Jewel, and Donally begins to lose

control over his pupil, until finally Jewel and a now

pregnant Marianne evict him from his place in the

Barbarian tribe. Jewel is later called upon to rescue his

estranged tutor who, Donally's son claims, has been

ambushed by professorial soldiers, but Jewel is shot and

killed in action. Marianne, realising a rising ambition,

prepares to take over the leading role.

Love is one of a trio of Carter's seemingly more

realist novels; it was written and set in 1969. Carter

claims that it is 'a modern-day, demonic version of

[Constant's] Adolphe, ' which she has 'macerated in

...
triple distilled essence of English provincial life. '21

It describes the lives of two brothers Lee and Buzz, and

the effect on their relationship of the intrusion of a

third person, Annabel, who later becomes Lee's wife. Lee

and Buzz, we are informed, were raised by an aunt, after

their mother went mad. Lee works his way through grammar

school and University to become a comprehensive school

teacher, Buzz, who 'steadfastly refused to learn

whilst

anything ' (p. 12) is an aimless drifter. Lee takes

useful,

in the disturbed Annabel, an art student just

emotionally

recovering from one attempted suicide, but Buzz's

from North Africa, and jealousy of his

unannounced return

brother's relationship, creates a volatile and complex

21 'Afterword' to Love (revised

Angela Carter,
version), p. 113.
Characters 147

situation. The novel traces the growth of the three-way

relationship, which is punctuated by Lee's affairs,

Annabel's consequent suicide attempts, and fights between

the brothers.

The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains and, to some

degree, Love, all decentre the traditional notion of

character, which is why it is only 'almost' possible to

relate to the characters in these novels. They challenge

the notion of a realist reading, expose the reading

conventions which structure such a reading, and, in the

process, they question the very possibility of

transcendence; however, they simultaneously suggest the

very thing they seek to invalidate. In order to describe

this process, though, it is necessary to draw a

distinction between what I shall call 'identities' and

'characters. ' 'Identities' refer to personages in

will

texts as they are seen, and created by, other personages;

'characters' to fictional personages created by

will refer

appear 'believable' to the

an author--which may or may not

reader. (I use 'personage' as a neutral term covering

both. ) Identities are the result of the process whereby

the the created by the fiction

personages within world

(or 'recognise') one another; 'characters' are

constitute
the reader uses the
the result of the process whereby

the text to constitute (or 'recognise')

evidence of

Within the tradition of criticism of realist

personages.

the first is assumed to be a

writing, process

the people relate to one

representation of way real
Characters 148

another (though critics in that tradition would regard it

more as 'recognition' than construction), whereas the

second process frequently gets overlooked. The term

'character' as usually employed in criticism covers both

of my terms 'identity' and 'character': thus, for

example, a critic of Middlemarch may discuss Dorothea's

relationships with certain of the other characters who

live in Middlemarch, and also examine George Eliot's

technique in creating the character Dorothea. It can do

this because both are assumed as a matter of unproblematic

knowing. Carter's novels, as we shall see, force us to

become conscious of the difference between identity and

character, only to dissolve this very difference by

revealing both to be constructs. Another way of putting

this might be that in the realist tradition--for example,

George Eliot's Middlemarch--the novelist strives to create

the illusion that everything is 'identity' (within the

world of the the world of the reader, and in

novel, within

the act of reading), whereas, in Carter, as in a modernist

text (an extreme example would be James Joyce's Finnegans

Wake), is to be 'character' (that is, a

everything shown

conventionally-constructed, non-knowable entity).

Importantly, though, in Carter's work, this is not a

simple displacement of one term by another--all

'character-as-construction' rather than all

'identity'--since Carter does totally abandon the

not

notion of identity. Her work questions the very notion of

Characters 149

knowing, whilst simultaneously acknowledging and

capitalising upon the power of the desire to know.

Another way to clarify this distinction between

identity and character, and demonstrate why it is

necessary to posit such a distinction, is to look briefly

at the work of a couple of other contemporary writers.

Within the world portrayed by Fay Weldon's The Life and

22
Loves of a She Devil, for example, identity is shown to

be constructed and therefore changeable: Ruth, the

heroine and 'She Devil, ' reconstructs both her physical

and mental identity. We are not, however, invited to

question our own reading of 'natural' characters. Of

course, any staging of the construction of identity is

likely to remind the reader of his/her own activity as

reader of character, but the text does not dramatise or

thematise this activity and we can always be confident as

readers that this character--supernatural as she may

appear--is 'real. '23 In contrast to this we might

consider David Lodge's novel How Far Can You Go which

shows characters to be artificial: the narrator, for

instance, continually intervenes to describe how certain

22 Fay Weldon, The Life Loves of a She Devil

and
(London: Coronet Books, 1984.
23 is J. M. Coetzee's Life & Times
Another example
1983), in which
of Michael K (London: Secker and Warbarg,
K 'becomes' him (for example, he becomes
what others make
'Michaels' in the hospital). Coetzee's later novel, Foe
(London: Secker Warbarg, 1986), however, has far more
and
in common with Carter's work: it not only examines
identity but also invites us. to question our own reading
processes.
Characters 150

characters are being formed in the writing process. At

one point he hesitates between different names for one of

his characters, 'Let her be called Violet, no, Veronica,

no Violet, improbable a name as that is for Catholic girls

of Irish extraction' (p. 15). Identities within the

fictional world, however, appear to be independent, and

'natural. ' It might also be argued that Lodge's technique

calls attention to the construction of character in order

to force consideration of how we read identity, but,

again, this is not proposed overtly. Such a novel self-

consciously reflects upon interesting questions about how

we read fiction but it does not necessarily raise

questions about how we 'read' each other. Carter's text,

I shall argue, self-consciously dramatises both of these

things. It raises questions about the notion of identity

(in the world of the novels and in our world), and also

explores the in which fictional characters are both

ways

read and written into a text. The following two sections

will discuss identity and character separately.

II

Within the fictional world depicted by The Magic

Toyshop, Love identity is

Heroes and Villains, and
In all three of
announced as an artificial construction.

these the very obviously, to

novels personages are shown,

be playing they to have either freely

roles which seem

adopted or have had imposed upon them by other

Characters 151

24 The former, those in

personages. power, appear to

control the script in which everyone, including

themselves, is written. Cixous, discussing character,

claims that, in much modernist fiction, character is not

done away with, but is

unmasked: which does not mean revealed!

[because there is nothing beneath. ] But rather
denounced, returned to his reality as
simulacrum, brought back to the mask as mask.
('The Character of "Character, "' p. 387)

In the worlds portrayed by The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and

Villains, and Love, indeed, in all of Carter's fiction,

identity is 'unmasked, ' that is, it is shown to be a

series of roles or appearances, with no 'real' identity

lurking behind; as Donally warns Marianne: 'MISTRUST

25
APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING' (p. 60).

Elaine Millard claims that Melanie's 'quest for self

26 The
definition is at the centre' of The Magic Toyshop.

first the focuses upon the ways in

part of novel certainly

24 The Loves of
Life a She Devil also
Weldon's and
the artificiality playing. Ruth is
reveals of role
conscious of the way the world reads her as a
stereotypically woman, and conscious of the artifical
ugly
roles that is therefore forced, by society, to play.
she
She therefore, for example, goes to a separatist women's
camp in order to lose weight because the roles she plays
in men's company prevent her from dieting.

25 in Sartre's Nausea (1936)

The narrator
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) comes to the same
they appear to be
conclusion: 'Things are entirely what
and behind them... there is nothing' (p. 140).

26
Sara Mills, Lynne Pearce, Sue Spaull, and Elaine
Millard, Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (Hemel
Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 135.
Characters 152

which Melanie attempts to construct her self by acting out

a series of different roles gleaned from literature,

particularly fairy stories, art, and women's magazines.

At the opening, Melanie is 'trying on' roles in front of a

mirror as she tries to account for the changes in her

adolescent body; and her self-identity is created out of

the way she sees herself in a combination of these roles:

She also posed in attitudes, holding things.

Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black
hair to stream straight down from a centre
parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she
held a tiger-lily from the garden under her
chin, her knees pressed close together. A la
Toulouse Lautrec, she dragged her hair
sluttishly across her face and sat down in a
chair with her legs apart and a bowl of water
and a towel at her feet.... She was too thin for
a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale,
smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain
wound round her head and the necklace of
cultured pearls at her throat. After she
...
read Lady Chatterley's Lover, she secretly
forget-me-nots and stuck them in her
picked
pubic hair. (pp. l-2)

Melanie tries to turn herself into a desireable sex object

in her takes the form of a 'gift-wrapped, '

own eyes, which

woman-as-commodity, image of herself in her mirror:

She used the as raw material for a

net curtain
suitable for her wedding
series of nightgowns
herself. She
night which she designed upon
herself for a phantom bridegroom
gift-wrapped
his teeth in an
taking a shower and cleaning
bathroom-of-the-future in
extra-dimensional
honeymoon Cannes. Or Venice. Or Miami Beach.
(P. 2)

The main this in the novel is Melanie's

romance at point

romance herself: she is in love with her own, self-

with

in fantasies, believes herself to

created, image, and, her

be this image. When she tries on her mother's wedding

Characters 153

dress, for example, she appeals to her mirror, like the

narcissistic Queen in Snow White, to tell her if she is

indeed beautiful:

She opened her mother's wardrobe and inspected

herself in the long mirror. She was still a
beautiful girl. She went back to her own room
and looked at herself again in her own mirror to
see if that said different but, again, she was
beautiful. Moonlight, white satin, roses. A
bride. Whose bride? But she was, tonight,
sufficient for herself in her own glory and did
not need a groom. (p. 16)

Her romance with herself, however, is interrupted by her

parents' death; judging herself responsible, Melanie

smashes the mirror in order to destroy herself, since for

Melanie, the image in the mirror is herself:

She went into her bedroom. She met herself in

the mirror, white face, black hair. The girl
who killed her mother. She picked up the
hairbrush and flung it at her reflected face.
The mirror shattered. Behind the mirror was
nothing but the bare wood of her wardrobe.

She was disappointed; she wanted to see her

mirror, still, and the room reflected in the
mirror, still, but herself gone, smashed.
(pp. 24-25)

Once relocated to London, however, Melanie is struck

by the absence of mirrors ('There was no mirror in (her

bed]room' (p. 44), and 'There was no mirror in the

bathroom' (p. 56)); sees her reflection in a

she only

distorting 'witches ball' (p. 169) and in Finn's eyes, but

otherwise becomes dependent upon the ways in which others

see her. It is now Uncle Philip, the archetypal

patriarch, who writes the script to which the other

personages must conform: he is the puppet-master who

Characters 154

their 27
pulls all of strings. Soon after her arrival

Melanie finds herself caught up in the rigid household

rituals dictated by her Uncle: 'She was a wind-up

putting-away doll, clicking through its programmed

movements. Uncle Philip might have made her over,

already. She was without volition of her own' (p. 76).

Uncle Philip also attempts to maintain control over Finn,

and breaks him as if he were a toy so that all of Finn's

'lovely movement was shattered' (p. 132), and 'he no longer

moved like a wave of the sea. He creaked, indeed, like a

puppet' (p. 148). Philip choreographs Melanie's seduction

by Finn--he instructs them to rehearse Melanie's role in

he puppet play, 'Leda and the Swan, ' expecting the role to

turn into a reality--but Finn sees through his scheme at

the last moment, and explains to Melanie:

'It was his fault' he said. 'Suddenly I saw it

all, when we were lying there. He's pulled our
strings as if we were his puppets, and there I
was, all ready to touch you up just as he
wanted. ' (p. 152)

Finally, at the scene of the 'real' play, Uncle

Philip in Melanie's rape. And it is at

succeeds staging

this point that Melanie's inability to distinguish clearly

between her 'real' identity--which, as I have already

shown, a combination of roles--and the

she reads as

27 Honeybuzzard, in Carter's
Like Uncle Philip,
first novel, Shadow Dance, makes Jumping Jacks which
the in his life he would like to control.
resemble people
Finally, he makes a Jumping Jack version of Ghislaine, a
former to Morris
girlfriend whom he abused, commenting
that "'She always did jump when I pulled her string, poor
girl"' (p. 127): he then lures her to her death.
Characters 155

'artificial' role of Leda which she is forced to play,

proves to be her downfall. When the swan first appears on

the stage Melanie is amused:

It was a grotesque parody of a swan; Edward Lear

might have designed it. It was nothing like the
wild, phallic bird of her imaginings. It was
dumpy and homely and eccentric. She nearly
laughed again to see its lumbering progress.
(p. 165)

Melanie, however, loses her grasp of the distinction

between what is fact and what fiction, and finds herself

passively becoming just as artificial, or as real, as the

swan. The rape, therefore, is 'real, ' even if it is only

real as fiction:

All her laughter was snuffed out. She was

hallucinated; she felt herself not herself,
wrenched from her own personality, watching this
whole fantasy from another place; and, in this
staged fantasy, anything is possible. Even that
the swan, the mocked up swan, might assume
reality itself and rape this girl in a blizzard
of white feathers. The swan towered over the
black-haired girl who was Melanie and who was
not. (p. 166, my emphasis)

Role playing and the importance of appearances are

also stressed in Love, where the personages within the

world of the novel are often described as play-actors.

For example, the aftermath of the party marking Lee and

Annabel's wedding, at which Annabel watches the spectacle

of Lee and Carolyn's erotic liaison on the balcony and

then attempts to kill herself in the bathroom, is

described in advance as if it were a drama:

Afterward, the events of the night seemed, to

all who participated in them, like disparate
sets of images shuffled together anyhow. A
draped form on a stretcher; candles blown out by
a strong wind; a knife; an operating theatre;
Characters 156

blood; and bandages. In time, the principle

actors (the wife, the brothers, the mistress)
assembled a coherent narrative from these images
but each interpreted them differently and drew
their own conclusions which were all quite
dissimilar for each told himself the story as if
he were the hero except for Lee who, by common
choice, found himself the villain. (p. 43)

Annabel and Buzz live, and interpret events, in their own

private world, acting out roles in their own scripts.

Annabel, for example, sees 'only appearances' (p. 36); she

lives in her nightmarish fantasies, which expand to

incorporate Lee and Buzz, where everybody and everything

exists solely in terms of her mythology:

She suffered from nightmares too terrible to

reveal to him, especially since he himself was
often the principle actor in them and appeared
in many hideous dream disguises.... She had the
capacity for changing the appearance of the real
world which is the price paid by those who take
too subjective a view of it. All she
apprehended through her senses she took only as
objects for interpretation in the expressionist
style and she saw, in everyday thing a world
of mythic, fearful shapes. (pp. 3-4)

Similarly, after Buzz steals his first camera, we are

informed that, 'the flat was given over entirely to the

cult of appearances, ' and Buzz sees everything as in two

dimensions. He

used the camera as to see with, if

as if he
could not trust his own eyes and had to check
his vision by means of a third lens all the time
so in the end he saw everything at second hand,
without depths. (p. 25)

Lee, however, thinks of his life as a series of cast-off

roles to have been constructed for him. He

which seem

28
She resembles the narrator in Sartre's Nausea,
who, because of his acute awareness of everything, can
sometimes make no distinction between his inner self and
external objects.
Characters 157

has, for example, a series of artificial smiles he

which

adopts for different situations (p. 19). His actual

appearance appears to become affected by the way others

see him:

Looking in the mirror, he saw the face of a

stranger to any of them with features which had
been filtered through his wife's eyes and
subjected to so many modifications in the
process that it was no longer his own. (p. 26)

More self-conscious than The Magic Toyshop or Love,

Heroes and Villains not only thematises role-playing as

critical to the shaping of identity, but also portrays it

as a topic of discussion between the personages. For

example, just as Uncle Philip dictates the lives of those

in his household, so Donally is writing and directing the

script for the Barbarian tribe which he has adopted.

Unlike Philip, Donally's direction very obviously includes

his own identity. Donally is not only portrayed as

constructing his own and others' identities, but also as

describing to Marianne how he has to construct the very

conventions which produce the illusion of his power. He

compares himself to Marianne's father, complaining: '"He

didn't have to and fortify it by

create a power structure

any means at his disposal. He was sustained by ritual and

tradition; both of I must invent"' (p. 63). On the

which

one hand, Donally appears to suggest that the post-

apocalyptic world the 3arbarians inhabit is a world

outside he act out the role of God,

convention, where can

and give himself the power to create others. On the other

hand, Donally to Marianne that God is dead

explains
Characters 158

(p. 93), and describes the overtly conventional for

models

his own versions of 'ritual and tradition, ' fashion

which

the basis of his 'power structure. ' This power structure

takes the form of a newly crafted religion, although it is

'new' only in the sense that it is a reworking of old

forms, in which he and his followers have hierarchical

roles to play. Donally readily admits to Marianne:

I still use most of the forms of the Church of

England. I find them infinitely adaptable.
Religion is a device for instituting the sense
of a privileged group, you understand; many are
called but few are chosen. (p. 63)

In this world, Donally suggests, there is no such thing as

'real' identity, hence he emphasises the need for roles:

it is "'a hypothetical landscape of ruin and forest in

which we might or might not exist"' (p. 93). It is

'hypothetical'; therefore everything has to be assumed or

supposed, nothing is known. Identity is a rational

creation, Donally claims, not a natural phenomenon; and

he rewrites the Cartesian cogito: 'I THINK, THEREFORE I

EXIST; BUT IF I TAKE TIME OFF FROM THINKING, WHAT THEN? '

(p. 98). Identity is unknowable, multiple, and unreliable,

since it is revealed to be a series of roles which are

always open to change. There are, the text suggests, only

appearances, the 'mask as mask, ' and Marianne finally

only

admits:

I shall be forced to trust appearances. When I

was a little girl, we played at heroes and
but now I don't know which is which any
villains
Characters 159

more, nor who is who, and whaý9can I trust if

not appearances? (pp. 124-25)

Donally capitalises upon the changeable nature of identity

and uses it to create himself as he would like to be. 30

The very technique, however, which exposes identity

as artificial in all of these novels also suggests the

converse. Ironically, it is the very terms 'mask' and

'role, ' used to describe identity in the fictional world,

together with the notion of disguise, which encourage

personages to assume an alternative, knowable identity

lurking behind what appear to be masquerades. All three

novels describe a series of staged events in which this

process is evident. One of the most powerful is Marianne

and Jewel's wedding ceremony in Heroes and Villains, where

role-playing is openly announced and both Marianne and

Jewel are dressed 'in character' for the performance:

There were gold braid and feathers in Jewel's

hair and very long earrings of carved silver in
his ears. Darkness was made explicit in the
altered contours of his face. He was like a
work of art, as if created, not begotten, a

29 in Weldon's The Life Loves of a She

Ruth, and
Devil, has come to a similar conclusion. In a
consultation with her plastic surgeon he claims, can
stop you looking old, but you will be old. "' and she
replies, '"No. Age is what the observer sees, not what
the observed feels"' (P. 203).
30 Life Ruth in The
In this way Donally resembles
and Loves Ruth turns her herself into
of a She Devil.
rival, the beautiful, elegant, and successful writer of
romantic fiction, Mary Fisher, whose place she usurps.
She can change her identity, but, it appears, she cannot,
her induced
and does not want to, transform patriarchally
but does this not in
values. She takes on a powerful role
order to break out of, but to conform to, the conventions
which label her 'ugly' self a 'She Devil. '
Characters 160

fantastic dandy of the true

void whose nature
has been entirely subsumed to the alien and
terrible beauty of a rhetorical His
gesture.
appearance was abstracted from his body, and he
was wilfully reduced to sign language. He had
become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she
herself had been forced to impersonate the sign
of a memory of a bride. But though she knew
quite well she herself was only impersonating
this sign, she could not tell Jewel
whether was
impersonating that indeed,
other sign or had,
become it, for every line of his outlandish
figure expressed the most arrogant contempt and
it was impossible to tell this
whether or not
contempt was in his script. (pp. 71-72)

This passage is narrated from the point of view of

Marianne, who consciously perceives the roles they are

playing as part of Donally's 'script. ' Jewel is described

as if he were totally artificial: he had become the sign

of an idea of a hero, 'like a work of art, as if created

not begotten' (the biblical reference recalls Donally's

part in Jewel's construction). The masquerade, however,

is so obviously artificial that it necessarily points to

something behind itself which is more 'real, ' which does

not involve role-playing. Jewel is described as if he had

a 'true nature, ' an essence of Jewel, which could be

'entirely subsumed to a rhetorical gesture. '

...
Similarly, Marianne sees Jewel in terms of a simile, 'like

a work of art, as if created, not begotten' which suggests

that this is is 'really happening, ' as if she

not what

believes there is a more 'real' world outside the script

they are now performing. Marianne is aware of the script

as a script, believes that, whilst impersonating 'the

and

sign of a memory of a bride, ' she inhabits another,

'real, ' world. Jewel, however, appears to make no such

Characters 161

distinction: he may, she thinks, have 'become' his role;

and, once again, the very notion of becoming implies a

more natural state from which he is transformed into the

present artificial one.

The same effect is achieved by the descriptions of

Marianne's continual attempts to see behind the mask of

Donally's role-playing, as if trying to locate his 'real'

identity: '"Where do you come from, why are you here?

Why didn't you stay where you belonged, editing texts or

doing research? "' (p. 62). She assumes that he has a past,

or 'real, ' identity which predates his present role: but

Marianne can only guess at this past, and assume that

there was one. She has, of course, to hypothesise, and

invent a series of possible past identities for Donally,

which are, once again, roles, and her hypothesising

becomes obsessive: "'You must have been a Professor of

Literature, once"' (p. 50), "'Maybe you were a Professor of

Music, once"' (p. 61), 'III suppose you might have been a

Professor Sociology, (p. 62), and "'perhaps he

of once"'

had been a Professor of History"' (p. 71). But Donally

remains unplaceable, and ungraspable: "'I prefer to

remain anonymous, "' (p. 93) he claims.

Donally's own role as script writer and creator of

other identities to his fellow personages that

suggests

he in his own script, he is

whilst acts out roles

than He is more like God.

something other a construction.

Donally to be different from the

appears a special case,

other in the and I shall return to a

characters novel,
Characters 162

discussion of the sources of his power in Section V of

this chapter.

III

All this self-conscious role-playing within the world

of the fiction is bound to raise, for most readers, the

question of how we relate to the personages established by

the language of the text. Having once become aware of the

difference between identity and character, then, the two

categories can once more be equated, since at the same

time as we witness personages consciously acting out roles

or creating their own, obviously artificial, identities,

we are constantly reminded that these very personages are

fictional characters, and, as such, that they are textual

constructions. Furthermore, while the personages in the

world of the text are dramatising the ways in which

character is written and read into the text, they are also

representing the ways in which people in the world outside

the text fabricate and relate to one another. At this

point, then, the distinction between reading identity

(whether it happens the world of the novel or the

within

world the character breaks down.

of reader) and reading

The two processes which in the tradition of realist

criticism might be regarded simply as 'knowing' or

'recognition'--personages in the novel come to 'know' one

another's identities; readers come to 'know' the

characters--are clearly exposed by Carter's work as

Characters 163

constructions, already-written roles. That is, identity

and character reinforce one another in the realist

novel--as matters of knowing--and they also reinforce one

another in these novels, but as matters of construction.

This is clearly dramatised in both The Magic Toyshop

and Heroes and Villains, where all of the examples that I

have cited above in exploration of the dual function of

'identity' are equally applicable to an analysis of

'character. ' In each case the reader is encouraged to

assume a 'reality' even while it is being undermined.

That is, both novels assert, again and again, that they

are not transparent mediums through which the reader has

direct access to human nature, but that both the reading

of character and the constitution of identity (inside and

outside the novel) are the artificial products of

convention, even while creating convincing (or almost

convincing) characters. The account of these novels's

self-conscious concern with the notion of identity (both

within the novel and within our world), necessarily

reminding the reader of his/her own activity as a reader

of character in and out of fiction, could be used to

describe the work of many other twentieth-century writers

(Fay Weldon, for example, comes to mind). What makes

Carter's fiction interesting, however, are the

especially

self-conscious ways in which her novels do this while

constantly announcing their own fictional status.

Love is the here, since although the

exception

narrative does continually draw attention to the

Characters 164

conventions from which identity and character are

constructed, these constructions are associated with

madness rather than seen as a part of normal mental

processes. Both The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains

set out to prove that there is nothing beyond appearances

(whilst still relying upon their reader's desire to

penetrate beyond the surface). In one sense Love has

similar aims since the two-dimensional becomes the norm

after Annabel has Lee's heart tattooed on his chest:

He raised his arm and no shadow fell for Annabel

had taken out his heart, his household god,
squashed it thin as paper and pinned it back on
the extTrior, bright, pretty but inanimate.
(p. 74)3

Annabel's desire, early in the novel, to 'reduce [Lee] to

not-being' (p. 35) is thus materialised. However, because

this two-dimensional vision is associated with

madness--with Annabel Buzz--it fails to convince; it

and

still suggests that there is a saner, more 'real' world

beyond Annabel's grasp and hence reinforces a distinction

between is and what is not. Love is one of

what real

Carter's novels, and twenty years later she

more realist

is to in the style of George

able write an afterword,

convincing, if
Eliot, which takes the form of a reasonably

the lives of her

self-conscious, description of continuing

31 image in The
Jeanette Winterson uses a similar
Passion (1987) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). In
heart is symbolic,
Carter's novel, the removal of Lee's
though he begins in its In The
to believe materiality.
Passion, literally to lose her heart to
Villanelle seems
her female lover, to lengths to steal
and has to go great
it back.
Characters 165

characters (except, of course, Annabel), as if they had an

existence beyond the novel and were, in 1989, 'edging

nervously up to the middle age they thought would never

happen' (p. 113)
.

In The Magic Toyshop the distinction between what is

real and what artificial is challenged, and the

distinction between identity and character breaks down,

when the roles which Melanie imagines for herself appear

to take on a life of their own. At one point Melanie

superimposes gothic fairytale upon familiar household

images in order to read her new surroundings at Uncle

Philip's:

Bluebeard's castle, it was, or Mr Fox's manor

house with 'Be bold, be bold but not too bold'
written up over every lintel and chopped up
corpses neatly piled in all the wardrobes and
airing cupboards, on top of the sheets and
pillowslips. (p. 83)32

But later the image from 'Bluebeard' materialises and

Melanie thinks she sees a severed hand in the dresser

drawer:

From the raggedness of the flesh at the wrist,

it appeared that the hand had been hewn from its

32 (London: Longman, 1977),

In The Fairie Queene
Book 3, Canto xii, stanza 54, Spencer writes:

And as she lookt about, she did behold,

How ouer that same dore was likewise writ,
Be bold, be bold, and euery where Be bold
...
At last she spyde at that roomes vpper end,
Another yron dore, on which was writ,
Be not so bold; though she did bend
whereto
Her earnest not what it might
mind, yet wist
intend.
Characters 166

arm with a knife or axe that was very blunt.

Melanie heard blood fall plop in the drawer.

'I am going out of my mind, ' she said aloud.

'Bluebeard was here. ' (p. 118)

The very detail with which this scene is described

suggests its 'reality. ' Conversely, the reference to

Bluebeard reminds the reader of the artificial way Melanie

is forced to read her surroundings, and the subsequent

materialising of the image draws the reader's attention to

the fictional status of the text itself. This, of course,

is dramatised more forcefully during the description of

the rape scene, where neither Melanie nor the reader can

determine for sure whether Melanie's rape was 'real. ' It

may have been 'real' as fiction for both Melanie and the

reader, where fiction is the reality.

Both the 'Bluebeard' incident and the rape scene in

The Magic Toyshop exemplify what is perhaps the most

explicit way in which most of Carter's work reminds the

reader of the fictionality of both 'identity' and

'character': that is, they announce the dependence of

both literature. As I suggested in

upon other works of

Chapter 2, intertextuality in Carter's work functions on

many different levels. In the second section of The Magic

Toyshop Melanie can only identify the incomprehensible and

frightening things around her by association with

familiar, literary, The identities that are

often models.

created in the The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and

worlds of

Villains literature; and, likewise, the

are modelled upon

characters reminded, are fictional, since

we read, we are
Characters 167

they are shown to be constructed out of literary

allusions. Both the notion of role-playing and the

dependence of these roles upon literary models is made

explicit in the text; and both prevent a realist reading

33
of character. Like Daniel Ferrer describing Joyce's

Ulysses, we can say that in Carter's novels, 'everywhere,

the overwhelming intertextuality dissolves the appearance

of a unified subject' ('Characters in Ulysses' pp. 149-50).

The implication is not only that all our reading of

characters is modelled on our reading of other fiction,

but that our reading of each other is modelled on our

reading of fiction too, as Nabakov suggests.

When Melanie enters her Uncle Philip's home in The

Magic Toyshop, it is as if she had stepped into the

inverted world beyond the mirror which she broke. In this

'through-the-looking glass' world Melanie cannot read her

surroundings literally, but can only identify herself, her

family, and her surroundings by comparing them to literary

models her frames of reference. In the first

within

section the Melanie chose to construct her

of novel

identity, visually, from a number of famous paintings;

33 Novel, Ian Watt, worrying

In The Rise of the
about this kind of practice, writes:

is surely damaging for a novel to be in

It very
imitation of another literary work:
any sense an
for this seems to be that since
and the reason
the novelist's task is to convey the
primary
impression of fidelity to human experience,
to any pre-established formal
attention
conventions can only endanger his success.
(p. 14)
Characters 168

later in the novel, however, she adopts mainly literary

models. In effect, Melanie compensates for the lack of

mirrors in her new home by reflecting the incomprehensible

things around her in a linguistic mirror: she reflects

her new surroundings in a series of similes. On the trip

to London, Melanie realises that she 'had never known an

orphan before and now here she was, an orphan herself.

Like Jane Eyre' (p. 32). When she wakes up the following

morning the first thing she sees is the strange wallpaper:

'Melanie opened her eyes and saw thorns among roses, as if

she woke from a hundred years' night, la belle au bois

dormant, imprisoned in a century's steadily burgeoning

garden' (p. 53). She compares Finn to an Edward Lear poem

in an attempt to account for his dirtiness: 'He had taken

off his paint-stiffened apron but there was blue paint in

his hair and his hands were blue, like those of the

Jumblies who went to sea in a sieve' (p. 96). And she

recognises, alluding to Alice In Wonderland, that Uncle

Philip's false teeth signal his presence in the house:

'On a smeared glass shelf, a full set of false teeth

faceless, Cheshire cat, from a

grinned like a disappeared

cloudy tumbler' (p. 56). Similes account for nearly

everything, from the old dog who has 'an uncanny quality

of whiteness, like Moby Dick' (p. 83), to the approach of

winter: 'The nights drew in earlier and earlier, clothed

in sinister like characters by Edgar Allan

cloaks of mist

Poe' (p. 93). I have described these similes as if they

all emanated from Melanie's consciousness, since the

Characters 169

narrative perspective appears to be hers (although they

are also rather sophisticated for a fifteen-year-old-girl

who has discarded Lorna Doone (p. 2) in favour of Mrs

Rundle's women's magazines); but this is problematised by

the complex narrative viewpoint. The novel is narrated in

the third person, but appears to switch in and out of

Melanie's consciousness (this is the same technique as

Carter uses in Nights at the Circus, where the third

person narrative is often mistaken for Walser's voice),

hence it is often difficult to specify whether particular

literary allusions stem from Melanie's imagination or are

part of the larger textual framework. What is clear,

however, is that identity and character in this novel are

both dependent upon these literary models, where the

excessive use of similes and the unstable narrative

function to remind the reader of the fictional status of

this text.

Heroes and Villains works in a similar way, making

explicit to, for example, Swift's

and recurrent references

Gulliver's Travels and the book of Genesis. Donally,

include figures of authority, finds

whose role models only

the inspiration for his 'power not only in

structure'

but in literature. Donally imagines himself

religion also

to the whom he has chosen to

superior race of people with

live, invokes Gulliver, as he appears in

and the role of

Book 4 of He would like to cast both

Gulliver's Travels.

Marianne in and he appeals to

and Jewel similar roles,

Marianne's sense "'Domiciled as you are

of ambition:
Characters 170

among the Yahoos, you might as well be Queen of the

midden"' (p. 61). Jewel, he claims, '"could be the Messiah

of the Yahoos"' (p. 93), or, as a last temptation to Jewel

before his eviction from the their company, he claims he

could make Jewel "'the King of all the Yahoos and all the

Professors, too"' (p. 126).

Brooks Landon interprets Heroes and Villains in terms

of a 'reconstructed Edenic myth' and identifies Donally's

role as a revised Satan: 'A stuffed snake the symbol of

his power, Donally tries to play the devil to Marianne's

Eve, but inversely: since she has knowledge, he offers

her 34 however, imagines himself

unreason. Donally, not

as Satan, but as God the creator (although he denies this

ambition to Marianne when she suggests it, replying "'I'd

rather choose to be the holy spirit"' (p. 93)). Jewel is

Donally's Adam, and cannot forget the role prescribed for

him, since the Doctor has literally inscribed the

reference on Jewel's skin:

He wore the figure of a man on the right side, a

left tatooed the length of his
woman on the and,
spine, a tree with a snake curled round and
round the trunk. This elaborate design was
executed in blue, red, black and green. The
woman offered the man a red apple and more red
leaves at the top of the
apples grew among green
tree, his shoulders, and the
spreading across
black the tree twisted and ended at the
roots of
top of his buttocks. The figures were both

34 'Eve the End of the World:

Brooks Landon, at
Sexuality Expectations in Novels by
and the Reversal of
Berger, ' in Erotic
Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas
Literature, edited by
Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic
Donald (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986),
Palumbo
pp. 61-74 (p. 69).
Characters 171

stiff and lifelike; Eve wore a perfidious

smile....

'You can never take all your clothes off, ' she
said. 'Or be properly by yourself, Iýth Adam
and Eve there all the time. ' (p. 85)

Unfortunately, Donally explains to Marianne, God's work,

in a post-apocalyptic world, is not easily accomplished

(this might also be interpreted as an ironic comment on

the problems of authorship, and the creation of character

in a post-realist novel):

'I am trying to invent him [Jewel/Adam] as I go

along but I am experiencing certain
difficulties, ' complained Donally. 'He won't
keep still long enough. Creation from the void
is more difficult than it would seem. ' (p. 94)

The literary and mythic allusions in both The Magic

Toyshop and Heroes and Villains, however, have a double

function. Like the roles they construct, the allusions

35 Joseph, in Several Perceptions, says the same

thing--'You can't ever take all your clothes off'
(p. 119)--to Mrs Boulder with regard to her wrinkles.

Tattoos are a familiar motif throughout Carter's

fiction, almost a trade mark. She explains some reasons
for her fascination with the art of tattooing in the
'People ' section of Nothing Sacred (pp. 33-38).
as Picture,
Particularly from her fiction are the
memorable examples
'wild 'was with an intricate interlaced
man' who covered
tattooing' in The Donkey Prince,
pattern of blue-and-read
p. 21; the heart Annabel forces Lee to have tattooed
which
on his to signify that 'he wore his heart on the
chest
in Love, 69-70; the 'fox hunt with the fox
outside' pp.
disappearing down his hole' Viv's mother's father
which
in Several Perceptions, p. 123; and the
used to exhibit,
Centaurs' bodies in the
elaborate descriptions of the
Infernal ritual tattooing. In
Desire Machines who undergo
The Passion, "Last Supper"' on the
the 'copy of Leonardo's
chest of the Colonel of the Children's crusade, which
ripples he and breathes, and 'gave an uncanny
when walks
to the faces of Christ and
appearance of almost-movement
his disciples' the closest resemblance to
(p. 154) bears
Jewel's ironically, the
tattoo. All symbolise, often
character's role, or their idea of their role.
Characters 172

are an important element of the text's illusion-making

machinery which encourages a realist reading of character

as knowable. That is, whilst pointing to character as

fictional construction, consisting of superimposed
literary roles, the allusions also bring with them their

own recognisable properties which suggest a depth and

significance outside the text, and which promote the

possibility of a realist reading. What I have called a

'double function, ' then, is dependent upon a crucial

paradox: in order to be recognisable and therefore to

appear 'real' and knowable, the character must conform to

a conventional role; as Derek Attridge maintains in his

article on character in Joyce: 'the notion of character

[is] predicated upon transcendence, ' and depends 'not

...
only on consistency and therefore recognizability (or, we

might say, iterability) within a text, but also on

consistency and recognizability across texts, and across

history' ('Joyce and the Ideology of Character, ' p. 153).

However, to the extent that allusions are made too

explicit, therefore announce fictionality, realism is

and

threatened. The reader may, for example, relate to, or

depend Marianne to guide him or her

upon, as a character

through the text. Marianne can be interpreted as a

reading figure: she is portrayed as a spectator, always

'the audience' (p. 16), remote and detached from much of

the action. She attempts to assimilate the elements of

her to conform to either the

own construction and refuses

Professors' ideas she should be, by

or Donally's of what
Characters 173

retaining a rational scepticism regarding both. Mrs Green

comments, '"You're an odd one, aren't you. You can't have

fitted in"' (p. 67), and Marianne appears to escape the

masquerade which everyone else is playing out. Her

suitability as a reading figure for the reader to identify

with, however, is in part due to her similarity to several

nineteenth-century heroines. The opening of the novel, as

Lorna Sage has noticed, 'parodies the opening of Jane

Austen's 1816 novel Emma'36 and Richard Boston, in the New

York Times, places the openings of Heroes and villains and

Emma side by side:

The first sentence of the book--'Marianne had

sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her
father loved her'--is like the beginning of a
Jane Austen novel ('Emma, ' for example: 'Emma
Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich. was the
. .
youngest of the two daughters of a most
affectionate, indulgent father. ' (13 September
1970, p. 62)

Marianne is also instantly recognisable as a particular

37 Boston also
type of nineteenth-century rebel heroine.

calls our attention to the similarities between Marianne

and Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss:

'Marianne herself is a rebellious girl, rather like Maggie

Tulliver in "The Mill on the Floss, " and like Maggie she

cuts off all her long hair so that she looks like a

36 Literary Biography,
Lorna Sage, Dictionary of
Vol. 14, 'British Novelists Since 1960, ' (Detroit,
Michigan: Bruccoli Clark, 1983), p. 207.

37 is within Carter's
Marianne also recognisable
detached, figure: the precursor of
work, as a spectator
and Walser in
Desiderio in The Infernal Desire Machines,
Nights at the Circus.
Characters 174

boy. '38 In this way Marianne's role is already written:

and the very fact that she is both recognisable within the

novel as a consistent character, and recognisable across

literary history as a type of nineteenth-century heroine,

both promotes and yet threatens a realist reading. This

is illustrated within the text: Marianne assumes that she

is a detached observer, but there are moments when she is

forced to reconsider her own identity, when she wonders

whether she is simply acting out a preordained role in

somebody else's script. Out for a walk by the river,

Marianne comes across Precious, Jewel's youngest brother,

watering his horse. He has his eyes closed and appears to

be dreaming, and Marianne suddenly realises: 'She could

not conceive what dreams the Barbarian's dreamed, unless

she herself was playing a part in one of their dreams'

(P. 65) 39
.

Heroes and Villains, then, capitalises upon the

ambiguous functions of role playing and intertextual

allusions to simultaneously challenge and urge a

38 In the Boston also claims that

same review
Marianne 'escapes from her own people to join [the
Barbarians], just like a little girl in a 19th-century
join the And like one of
story running away to gypsies.
for the
D. H. Lawrence's middle-class virgins confronted
first time by representatives of the working class,
is at the by the Barbarians'
Marianne same time appalled
by
ignorance lack of hygiene, and fascinated
poverty, and
their vitality and virility. '

39 This to Jorge Borges's 'The Circular

may allude
Ruins, ' in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other
Writings (New York: New Directions Books, 1964) pp. 45-50.
Characters 175

'traditional' reading of character. At the same time it

draws in other texts in order to thematise this very

issue. The relationship between art and nature--at the

heart of any consideration of character--is a constant

theme in Heroes and Villains, and Carter's text relies

upon two texts, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theories of the

noble savage and Shakespeare's The Tempest, which are both

concerned with this dichotomy, in order to enact a

'discussion' of the issue. Carter describes one of the

aims of Heroes and Villains in the interview with John

Haffenden, saying that this novel 'is a discussion of the

theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and strangely enough it

finds them wanting. '40 At the same time, Carter's novel

shows personages within the world of the text who are also

concerned with the same art/nature dichotomy, discussing

and acting out roles from these two source texts. Richard

Boston points to a wealth of literary allusions in Heroes

and Villains, and places these allusions in the context of

the novel's concern with art and nature:

This is not to suggest that Angela Carter has

written one of those irritating spot-the-
literary allusion works of fiction. What she
has done is to take her images from a variety of
sources, and assemble a fable that discusses the
roles of reason and imagination in a civilized
society. Marianne rejects the sterile
rationality of the Laputan Professors, but she
is also aware of the monsters that are brought
forth by the sleep of reason. (The title of

40 John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, (London:

Methuen, 1985), p. 95, my emphasis.
Characters 176

Goya's print is quoted. ) (New Ygrk Times Book

Review, 13 September 1970, p. 62)

Allusions to Rousseau and Shakespeare's The Tempest

are announced clearly by Carter's text, thereby making the

fictional status of the text explicit, and promoting the

notion of character as 'artificial, ' as construction.

Carter also rewrites and reshapes her source material in

its new context in a way which highlights the unstable,

variable, and therefore unknowable quality of literary

allusions. References to Rousseau are introduced early in

the novel: his writing is obviously important to

Marianne's father, who is writing a book 'on the

archaeology of social theory' (p. 8). The narrator

describes the Professor of History's failing eyesight,

explaining how 'Marianne would have to read his books

aloud to him. Rousseau for example' (p. 8). Later in the

novel, when Donally is attempting to impose Rousseau's

theories on the Barbarian village, he boasts: "'coaxed

from incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of

barbarism and aspire towards that of the honest savage"'

(p. 63). He has been shaping Jewel into the role of

Rousseau's 'noble ' though he also intends to keep

savage,

control over his creation. He offers Jewel a taste of

art, but attempts to retain the

culture, and power,

natural, of his pupil (and Jewel's

savage qualities

41 Boston's shows how

Interestingly, review
does lead to
acknowledging intertextuality not necessarily
his references to
a sense of constructedness. He uses
allusions in the humanizing,
service of a moralizing,
totally traditional reading.
Characters 177

subservience) by keeping his pupil illiterate: "'Our

Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous; literacy would

blur his outlines, you wouldn't see which way he was going
(p. 62). 42 When
any more"' Marianne asks him why he has

not taught Jewel to read, he explains: '"Self-defence, in

the first instance On the second count, I wanted to

...

maintain him in a crude state of refined energy. "' And

Marianne replies, "'What, keep him beautifully savage? "'

(p. 62). 43
Thus the notion of the 'noble savage, ' which is

an explanatory hypothesis, is taken by Carter's text and

by Donally as a literary role model for the post-holocaust

Barbarian. In itself this criticises Rousseau's

hypothesis--if it were valid, then Donally's activity

would be impossible.

42This be a reference to Levi-Strauss's

could also
'A Writing Lesson, ' in Tristes Tropiques, translated by
John Russell (New York: Criterion Books, 1961), pp. 286-
297. 'A Writing Lesson' concerns the Nambikwara Indians;
it is a meditation on the powerful significance of writing
as a corrupting tool which facilitates 'the enslavement of
other human beings' (p. 292).
43 'barbarian' in Several
Carter also used the term
Perceptions to describe Joseph's disgust with books. His
slogan also recalls Donally's grafitti:

'This is the time of the barbarians, ' said

Joseph, barbarian, kneeling on the
a typical
floor of the alcove where the dictionaries were
kept and burning books with matches, applying
the flame with fierce joy as each
and watching
page trembled and blackened; then he chalked
upon the near-by wall the following slogan:
SUPPORT YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD ASSASSIN and went
home to screw Charlotte. (p. 4)

The Wild Men in The Donkey Prince, published soon

after Heroes and Villains, are also described as
barbarians.
Characters 178

Boston compares Heroes and Villains to Shakespeare's

The Tempest:

There is a magician with a forked beard, scarlet

on one side and purple on the other. Like
Prospero in 'The Tempest' he is able to summon a
table full of food 'as from thin air. ' He keeps
his half-idiot son chained up and beats him
(Caliban? ), and explicitly suggests to Marianne
that she must feel like Miranda. (The New York
Times, September 13 1970, p. 62)

It is Donally, in the role of Prospero, who casts Marianne

in the role of Miranda: '"Marianne, " he said warmly. He

gestured round the room and company, smiling. "However,

you must feel more like Miranda"' (p. 50). Donally has

entered this scene just in time to prevent her from being

gang-raped by the Bradley brothers who could also

represent a collective Caliban. Donally has taken over

the leadership of the Barbarian tribe and usurped the

brothers' former power, just as Prospero has taken over

from Caliban as ruler of the island, and then kept him 'in

service. '44 It is not Caliban, however, who constitutes

the 'brave new world' for Miranda, but the creatures of

the 'civilised' world.

The allusions to Rousseau and The Tempest also

function as part of the illusion-making machinery; they

appear to clarify the meaning of characters's roles and

Most the references to

promote a transcendent reading. of

both the theories Rousseau The Tempest occur in

of and

dialogues, in which those who use literary allusions are

44 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Arden edition)

(London: Methuen, 1964), 1 (ii) 286.
Characters 179

educated and those who remain uneducated also remain

closest to nature. Hence when Marianne comes across

Precious watering his horse, she 'gasped':

for the rider looked just as if he had come from

the hands of original nature, an animal weaker
than some and less agile than others, but,
taking him all round, the most advantageously
organized of any, pure essence of man in his
most innocent state, more nearly related to the
river than to herself. (p. 65)

Whilst the self-conscious use of allusions points to the

artificial nature of the roles and to the fictionality of

the text, it also gives meaning to the status of all

intertextual allusions, where allusions, no matter what

their content, symbolise art.

IV

The Passion of New Eve is another in Carter's series

of picaresque tales. Susan Suleiman describes it as 'a

heterogeneous combination of mythic realism, science

fiction and allegory, with elements of Bildungsroman, a

picaresque tale, a quest romance, and a Hollywood love

story. '45 Evelyn, who narrates the story in retrospect,

was once a young, self-centred, male chauvinist, English

academic. At the the novel Evelyn is indulging

opening of

in nostalgia: he is a fan of the now outdated movie star,

45
Susan Suleiman, '(Re)writing the Body: The
Rubin
Politics Eroticism, ' in The Female
and Poetics of Female
Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives,
edited by Suleiman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1986), pp. 7-29 (p. 25).
Characters 180

Tristessa, whose films, are 'having a little camp

renaissance at midnight movie festivals' (p. 8), and he is

reliving his adolescence at one of these events, before

flying off to New York to begin a new job. Upon arriving

in the New World from the Old, instead of the 'clean,

hard, bright city' (p. 10) he had imagined, Evelyn

encounters 'a dying city' (p. 37), shrouded in 'Gothic

darkness' (p. 10), taken over by radical women, blacks and

an ever increasing number of rats. Here he meets a young

black prostitute called Leilah, whom he uses and abuses,

and with whom he quickly becomes bored, especially when he

realises that she is pregnant. He abandons the city, and

he abandons Leilah 'safely' incarcerated in hospital after

a back-street abortion that nearly kills her. Evelyn

flees to the desert for 'pure air and cleanness' (p. 38),

where he hopes to find 'that most elusive of all chimeras'

(p. 38), himself. In the desert, however, he is captured

by a woman called Sophia and taken to Beulah, an

underground community of Amazons, whose emblem is a broken

phallus, and whose living goddess, 'Mother, ' a skilled

plastic surgeon, has constructed herself into 'the

concrete essence of woman' (p. 60). Mother has 'made

herself, ' and flung a 'patchwork quilt stitched from her

daughter's breasts the cathedral of her interior, the

over

cave within the cave' (p. 60). Mother rapes and then

castrates Evelyn, transforming him into the New Eve, a

perfect specimen of biological woman, and the realization

of his own masturbatory fantasy. Mother plans to

Characters 181

impregnate Eve with his own sperm, collected his

after

rape, but Eve escapes into the desert, only to fall prey

to Zero the poet. Zero is self-styled 'Masculinity

incarnate' (p. 104), who hates humanity, and his

privileges

pigs over his seven slave-like wives (eight, when Eve

joins them). Eve is unceremoniously raped, and

subsequently educated into the realms of women's

oppression at its most extreme. Zero is obsessed with

Tristessa, whom he believes has caused him to be sterile,

and he spends his time ranging over the desert in a

helicopter in search of the secret hideaway to which she

has retired. When Zero and his wives do find and

penetrate Tristessa's glass mansion, they find her lying

in her own coffin in 'THE HALL OF THE IMMORTALS' (p. 119),

a waxworks of Hollywood stars; they also discover that

s/he is a transvestite who had 'been the greatest female

impersonator in the world' (p. 144). Zero and his wives

force Tristessa and Eve into a grotesque travesty of a

marriage ceremony--'a double wedding--both were the bride,

both the groom' (p. 135)--and also force a consummation,

but the married couple manage to escape in Zero's

helicopter, leaving all behind them in chaos and

destruction as Tristessa's revolving house spins out of

control. Marooned in the desert, out of fuel, Eve and

Tristessa make love, only to be interrupted by 'the

Children's Crusade' (p. 159), who shoot Tristessa and take

Eve, Tristessa's child, along with them.

now pregnant with

Eve escapes once more, and finally leaves the desert.

Characters 182

S/he discovers her/himself in the heart of civil war in

California, but is reunited with Leilah, now Lilith, a

feminist guerrilla, who leads Eve back to Mother deep in a

womb-like cave by the sea, the symbolic place of both

death and rebirth.

Names play an important part in the construction of

character, and the names of characters in Carter's fiction

are always distinctive, nowhere more so than in The

Passion of New Eve. This novel's self-conscious concern

with its own material status as language can be seen by

looking at the way it experiments with names. Like the

roles and literary allusions discussed in The Magic

Toyshop, Love, and Heroes and Villains, many of the names

in Carter's novels have a double function, encouraging a

realist mode of reading, but continually reminding the

reader that names are unstable and variable because they

are part of the linguistic process. Names in a novel

traditionally set up a network of referentiality within

the text where each character seems recognisable and,

therefore, in knowable. Daniel Ferrer, in

some way

'Character in Ulysses, ' describes the convention of naming

fictional characters as 'the association of a number of

characteristics name, ' where 'the noun acts

with a proper

as them and organises them'

a magnet which attracts
Characters 183

(p. 148). 46 Proper (in the 'realist'

names mode), are
indispensable for the whole concept of 'knowing, ' since

they imply a singular and unique referent. These names,

then, function as representations of a whole wealth of

meaning, and by denying their own status as writing, as

articulation, they appear to make the character present

and knowable to the reader. Carter's text, however,

whilst capitalising on the realist function of names, also

reminds us that names are constructed in writing, that

they are constructions of language, and are, consequently,

infinitely 47 To be
variable. readable and recognisable

names must be coded, they are therefore always capable of

change and they have no essence. Characters' names in The

Passion exemplify this point very clearly, since, as I

shall demonstrate, they are transformed, multiple,

assumed, or shared, never fixed or stable.

In The Passion, as in Carter's earlier novels, the

distinction between identities within the world of the

text and characters, the text's constructions, is

46 Ferrer draws this definition from Roland

Barthes's S/Z (1970) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), in
which Barthes writes,

The proper name enables the person to exist

outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless
constitutes it entirely. As soon as a Name
exists (even a pronoun) to flow toward and
fasten onto, the semes become predicates,
indicators of truth, and the Name becomes a
subject. (p. 191)
47 See Jacques Derrida's Signeponge/Signsponge,
translated by Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984), particularly pp. 118-21.
Characters 184

continually broken down; in this novel, both are shown,

self-consciously, to be linguistic constructions of the

same kind. The novel continually draws attention to

itself as language by dramatising how the personages

within the textual world of the novel consciously see

themselves and others as linguistic constructs. This idea

is perhaps most clearly presented in the case of the main

protagonist, who is allotted, or allots him/herself, since

he/she is the first person narrator, many names: Evelyn,

Eve, Eva, and 'I. ' Evelyn's body is transformed from male

to female, and this transformation, the text suggests via

Evelyn's narrative, is conditioned, and even precipitated,

by the functioning of language. Hence, we are not allowed

to forget that Evelyn is constructed out of language, and

hence be Mother, Evelyn explains, has

can reconstructed.

cut off his 'decorative appendage' (p. 60), and trimmed

both his body and his name. It was, he says, 'The plastic

surgery that turned me into my own diminutive, Eve, the

shortened form of Evelyn' (p. 71), and, 'Perhaps, I

body because they

thought, they had utilised my tender

horrid with all its

couldn't resist the pun of my name,

teasing (p. 73). It is perhaps because of

connotations'
the his Eve(lyn) explains, that his whole
pun of name,

character be transformed. Hence, we are made aware of

can

the in fiction as language, since

material status of names

it is because they constructs of language, and can

are

therefore be for instance, a pun, that names can

read as,

be transformed; and since the bodies of these characters

Characters 185

are also created in language, they are susceptible to the

same transformation.

Carter pushes the interrogation of the construction

of character in language one step further in The Passion

by dramatising how the distinction between character and

identity breaks down when they are exposed as part of the

same construction. In the world portrayed by Carter's

text, there is an important difference between the name

'Tristessa, ' which represents a fictional character, and

the other names which represent identities. The name

'Tristessa' is announced as a fiction; it is a stage name,

and is presented as such, with no pretence of reality.

This, of course, immediately suggests the concealment of

an 'original' name, and although we are not offered an

alternative, Evelyn does suggest that one exists,

admitting that he 'never knew his real name' (p. 144).

'Tristessa' represents both a film image and a movie star

and both are portrayed as artificial constructions: s/he

consciously describes the process of his/her construction

when s/he recalls her/his story for Evelyn: 'He described

the symbolic schema to which he attached the label,

Tristessa He had been she; though she had never been a

...

woman, only his creation' (p. 152). The description

ever

of a 'symbolic 'label' 'attached' fits snugly

schema' with

into Ferrer's characterisation; it reminds us

account of

not that this is fictional character, but that this

only a

is how fictional characters are formed.

Characters 186

The name 'Tristessa' is used to describe a character

who, we are repeatedly advised, 'could make only the most

perfunctory gestures towards real life' (p. 7). Tristessa

is 'as beautiful as only things that don't exist can be'

(p. 6), s/he is 'a sleeping beauty who could never die

since she had never lived' (p. 119), and she exists only as

the creation of a close collaboration between Hollywood

'movie moguls make-up artists drama coaches'

... ...
(p. 144), and the imagination of a transvestite who shares

the name: 'Tristessa had no function in this world except

as an idea of himself; no ontological status, only an

iconographic one' (p. 129). The character of Tristessa

therefore exists only as a representation: s/he is shown

to be constructed out of images, and is therefore

unknowable, and ungraspable. S/he was, Evelyn explains,

'not flesh itself but only a moving picture of flesh, real

but not substantial' (p. 8), which left only traces of

silver powder on the hands that clutched helplessly at

[her] perpetual vanishings' (p. 110). To imagine a real

life for Tristessa outside her text, away from the cinema

screen, Evelyn is to destroy her. When Evelyn is

warns,

sent a photo of her out of 'character' his disillusionment

begins:

I'd dreamed of meeting Tristessa, she stark

naked, tied, perhaps to a tree in a midnight
forest under the wheeling stars. To have
her on a suburban golf-course? Or
encountered
Dido in the laundromat. Or Desdemona at the
ante-natal clinic. Never! (p. 7)
Characters 187

Paradoxically, however, so long as the fact of her

contradiction is not stated, that is, before Evelyn is

sent the MGM photograph, Tristessa appears knowable. She

joins a line of recognisable mysterious women, and is

'knowable' because she is 'unknowable': Evelyn and the

audience feel they know her in her very mystery:

Tristessa had long since joined Billie Holliday

and Judy Garland in the queenly pantheon of
women who expose their scars with pride,
pointing to their emblematic despair just as a
medieval saint points to the wounds of his
martyrdom. (p. 6)

Readers may recognise Tristessa as a particular Hollywood

stereotype (Greta Garbo and others), in the same way that

they recognise Marianne as Maggie Tulliver and Emma.

Hence the allusion serves both to encourage a realist

reading, since Tristessa conforms to the stereotype, but

also to prevent such a reading, since she is self-

consciously 'denounced' as a stereotype.

The name Tristessa also represents the identity of

the transvestite out the role of film star. That

who acts

is, the text dramatises is concealed behind its own

what

dramatisation of a fictional character. And once again

the novel illustrates how identity and character are shown

to be the since Tristessa the

part of same construction,

transvestite is to be inseparable not only from the

shown

construction Tristessa the film star--'he had been she'

(p. 152)--but inseparable from Tristessa the film

also

image. All to be constructed out of the

are shown

language film, that is, projected images. When Evelyn

of
Characters 188

and Tristessa find themselves alone together in the

desert, Evelyn claims: 'The habit of being a visual

fallacy was too strong for him to break; appearance, only,

had refined itself to become the principle of his life.

He flickered the (p. 147). 48

upon air'

Names in The Passion also function like literary

allusions, or indeed, are literary allusions. This again

promotes a dual reading. The name Tristessa, for example,

is the title of a novel by Jack Kerouac which describes

what is believed to be the author's own 'nighttime

adventures in the slums mixing bourbon and morphine,

surrounded by people he didn't know well, never really at

ease, yet caught in his romantic fantasies about

Tristessa. '49 Kerouac's descriptions of Tristessa,

however, a Mexican prostitute and morphine addict, recall

Carter's Leilah. Evelyn perhaps bears an ironic

resemblance to Kerouac himself, whom the foreword to

Tristessa by Aram Saroyan describes as 'the American hero

in looks deeds'50 and who was famous for his obsession

and

48 Carter the same image in Shadow Dance

uses almost
to describe Henry Glass after his wife has committed
He 'seemed to flicker as he walked, like a
suicide.
was awry' (p. lll). She
silent film, as if his continuity
it the of Several Perceptions to
uses once again at end
describe 'He wavered he walked as if he were a
Kay: as
trick might suddenly disappear
piece of photography and
discreetly the air would not even be
altogether, so
disturbed by his passage' (p. 152).

49 Charters, Kerouac (San Francisco: Straight

Ann
Arrow Books, 1973), p. 224.
50 (1960) (New York: McGraw
Jack Kerouac, Tristessa
Hill, 1978), 'Foreword, " p. 4.
Characters 189

with travelling. Evelyn recalls his flight from New York

toward the desert as if he were a hero from Kerouac's On

the Road: 'Down the freeways in fine style, like a true

American hero, my money stowed between my legs' (p. 37).

All recognisable proper names necessarily bring with

them their own qualities which appear to be identifiable

and refer outside the text. Names, therefore, are part of

the illusion-creating mechanisms since they appear to have

a history beyond the text; and their very recognisability

suggests that they are also knowable. Names in The

Passion, such as Eve, Sophia and Lilith, also summon up a

vast cultural and literary history (it is ironic that Eve,

the symbol of the 'Fall of Man, ' is represented in this

novel as a 'Playboy center fold' (p. 75)); and the names

Mother and Zero symbolise particular powerful stereotypes.

The novel at once uses the symbolic nature of these

to reading and puts them in

references promote a realist

question by techniques, which include drawing

a variety of

attention to the as language. The text, for

names

example, shows how names are capable of becoming common

for instance, Zero can be read as zero, Mother

nouns, so

as mother, and Tristessa as tristesse. Tristessa's name,

Evelyn is 'Her name itself

claims, also onomatopoeic:

inexpressible sadness; the lingering

whispered rumours of

sibilants like the doomed petticoats of a young

rustled

is towards the end of the

girl who dying' (p. 122); and,
Characters 190

novel, Eve(lyn) realises that 'Mother is a figure of

(p. 184). 51
speech'

Disguise and role-playing once again play an

important part in The Passion, but whereas in the earlier

novels Carter exposed identity as a series of

roles--'denounced' the 'mask as mask' (Cixous, 'The

Character of "Character, "' p. 387)--The Passion, whilst

revealing the roles personages play, is also much more

concerned to point out and illustrate roles and disguises

in language. Personages within the textual world of The

Passion consciously describe the linguistic links between

their names and their roles. Leilah, for example, has

several names: she appears in the last part of the novel

as Lilith, and also possibly as Sophia: 'Lilith, also

known as Leilah, also, I suspect, sometimes masquerading

as Sophia or the Divine Virgin' (p. 175). Evelyn also

calls her 'Leilah, Lilith, Mud Lily' (p. 29). This

multiplicity of names and the ease with which they are

changed immediately draws the reader's attention to the

51 draws to the
All of Carter's work attention
significance of names. In Love, for example, Lee
immediately identifies Annabel, by her name, as a member
of the middle-classes; 'Annabel' and 'Lee' may well allude
to Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'Annabel Lee' which describes
the sheer love over death (cited in The Norton
power of
Anthology Literature, Vol. 1 (New York:
of American
Norton, 1979), pp. 1225-26); Annabel Leigh, also referred
to as 'Miss (p. 175), is Humbert Humbert's first love
Lee'
in Nabokov's Other examples occur in The
Lolita. obvious
Infernal Desire Machines Desiderio is the hero of a
where
desire, Doctor Hoffman alludes to E.
novel concerned with
T. A. Hoffmann, and Albertina may recall Proust's elusive
heroine 'Albertine' (Albert/Albertina reappears in Nights
at the Circus the hermaphroditic freak at Madame
as
Schreck's).
Characters 191

name as representation, as language. The name Leilah,

Lilith claims, was a disguise in language, 'III called

myself Leilah in the city in order to conceal the nature

(p. 174). 52 But behind is
of my symbolism"' the disguise

only another disguise, since the highly symbolic names

Lilith and Sophia represent a role, not a 'real, ' knowable

character. Leilah/Sophia/Lilith's changes of name

represent a series of artificial roles with nothing

concealed behind them. These roles, we are reminded

(since to disguise a name is also to disguise a role), are

constructed out of language. However, the illusion-

making machinery works on, and these names and roles,

because they are portrayed as disguises, continue to point

to some other concealed and knowable identity lurking

behind them.

All of Carter's novels discussed in this chapter

reveal the power of reading conventions which result

from/in the desire of the reader for whole, unique

characters to whom they can relate. I have demonstrated

how Carter's draws the into the text by

writing reader

exploiting reading conventions which rely upon

the reader's demand for a

recognition, almost satisfying

'traditional' of character, and I have also

reading

52 have changed their

Both Lee and Buzz in Love
names in order to erase their past history (see pp. 9-10).
Characters 192

demonstrated how these texts simultaneously show that such

demands are unrealisable, thus exposing the reading

conventions which we use to produce a realist reading as

conventions, and revealing their power. Even Love, as my

epigraph from the 'Afterword' establishes, self-

consciously points out the conventions which make

characters plausible, though not like 'life. '

Readers desire knowable characters to enable them to

read themselves reflected as knowable characters, or

rather, identities, as Derek Attridge argues:

every time we apprehend a character in a

literary text, we are reassured of our own self-
boundedness, self-consistency, and uniqueness;
our own knowability and undividedness; our own
existence independent of history, social
construction and ideology. ('Joyce and the
Ideology of Character, ' p. 153)

But, these novels contend, the notion of character as

is 53 It is
unified, whole, and knowable a myth. a myth,

moreover, which is dependent upon the reader's

relationship with the text, since, without the reader's

belief, of disbelief, in the

or willing suspension

illusion of 'living' characters, the term character would

refer to something quite different. Suspension of

disbelief produces a 'traditional, ' or transcendent,

as i discussed at the opening

reading of character, which,

of the 'guarantees the position of the subject

chapter,

53
The view as myth, Jonathan Culler
of character
notes in Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics Literature (London:
and the Study of
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 230, is held by
structuralists as well.
Characters 193

exactly outside any articulation [and therefore outside

convention]--the whole text works on the concealing of the

dominant discourse as articulation--instead the dominant

discourse presents itself exactly as the presentation of

objects to the reading subject' (MacCabe, 'Realism and the

cinema, ' p. 47).

Many of Carter's novels demystify this process and

dramatise the reader's construction of character by

showing how, in the world portrayed by the text, identity

is brought into existence and 'naturalised. ' Just as

readers construct character in a way which enables them to

see themselves reflected as 'independent of history,

social construction and ideology, ' so personages, or

groups of personages in the novels, are shown constructing

others, and in doing so, constructing themselves (and at

the same time naturalising that construction). Reader and

character are revealed in a binary relationship where both

are dependent upon one another for definition.

Donally, for example, who appears to be different

from the other personages in Heroes and Villains by being

outside convention--self-sufficient, in control of the

creation of his own identity--is not only shown, as I have

demonstrated, to be constituted by other literary texts,

but also shown not to be completely free to choose the

roles he plays. His identity is created in binary

opposition, that is, in a conventional hierarchical power

structure, with the Barbarian tribe. The role he casts

for himself, and which confirms him in the identity to

Characters 194

which he aspires (as a god-like, natural the

ruler of

tribe), is dependent upon others acting the he

out roles

creates for them. Similarly, Zero's identity in The

Passion is constructed in binary opposition his

with

wives. Both sides of the opposition--Donally and the

Barbarians, Zero and his wives--are mutually dependent:

without a following of people who believe in their power

Donally and Zero (whose name says it all), would be

nothing (both are like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan). Donally

and Zero create their own myth, by creating their own

religion and their own following, 'But this myth depended

on their [followers'] conviction; a god-head, however

shabby, needs believers to maintain his credibility' (The

Passion, p. 99). Donally and Zero, these novels

illustrate, are constructing characters around them, in

whom, so long as these characters continue to conform to

their given roles (so long as the characters believe in

the myth), they can also suspend disbelief and see

themselves reflected as characters. That is, they can see

themselves confirmed as identities which are dominant,

unique and apparently outside construction. Whilst the

opposition remains in place, the dominators maintain the

illusion of both power and autonomy. The followers, in

turn, believe themselves to exist only in the roles which

Donally and Zero have portrayed for them: they could all

say, like Eve and Zero's other wives: 'So he regulated

Characters 195

our understanding of him and also our understanding of

in to him' (The 54
ourselves relation Passion, p. 97).

Donally's dominant position as a Professor amongst

Barbarians is also accounted for in terms of the same

conventional hierarchical power structure. The

conventions which construct and continually reinscribe

identity not only define personages but also the separate

and unique identity of each community. The Professors, of

whom Donally is a representative, are in the dominant

position, writing the script for the Barbarians. This is

perhaps most clearly illustrated by the game the

professorial Children play: 'The children played Soldiers

and Barbarians; they made guns with their fingers and shot

one another dead but the Soldiers always won. That was

the rule of the game' (p. 2). The game describes a

hierarchical model of patriarchal war: it is a binary

opposition where each side struggles for power and control

over the identity of the other. In this binary

relationship the Professors and Barbarians are mutually

dependent needs the other in order to

since each one

define itself, Marianne's father explains to her:

as

'They [the Barbarians] hunt, maraud and prey on

us for the things they need and can't make
we are necessary to
themselves and never realise
finally destroy us, if they
them. When they
finally destroy they'll destroy their own
us,

54 be fully exemplified by a
This point will more
discussion of the dominator/dominated opposition with
in a
regard the conventional Man/Woman relationship
is important issue in The
patriarchal society. This an
discuss at length in the
Passion of New Eve which I shall
following chapter.
Characters 196

means of living so I do not think they will

destroy us. I think an equilibrium will be
maintained. But the Soldiers would like to
destroy them, for the Soldiers need to be
victorious, and if the Barbarians are destroyed,
who will we then be able to blame for the bad
things? ' (Heroes and Villains, p. 11).
Neither side is self-sufficient, but the Professors are

the side in power, and they are therefore in the position

to write the rules of the game, and project an identity

for the Barbarians which confirms their own autonomy. The

Barbarians also see themselves reflected, but this time in

the gaze of the other, where their place is inscribed for

them (like Zero's wives). The Barbarians, in effect, are

characters the Professors produce--'Sometimes I dream I am

an invention of the Professors' says Jewel (Heroes and

Villains, p. 82)--and hence they must dress up in make-up,

rags, and furs (Marianne describes Jewel as a 'marvellous,

defiant of textures and colours' (p. 147)) in

construction

order to fulfil their role of 'hobgoblins of nightmare'

(p. 5). But the Professors are also produced by the

Barbarian's belief in their power. Once again, the

opposition remains in place, and appears natural rather

than conventional, as long as the opposing forces suspend

disbelief, the of disbelief maintains the

since suspension

For Jewel knows that the roles the

status quo. example,

forces roles and yet, for the

warring play are only

duration he suspends disbelief.

of a battle willingly

Marianne him don his battle dress and the

watches

following interchange take place:

Characters
197

'When the Soldiers see you coming, they will

think you are the devil incarnate, riding a
black horse. '

'They are the devils, their

with glass faces.
One cannot escape the consequences of one's
appearance. '

'It is the true appearance of '

neither of you.
'But it is true as long as the
one or other of
us wants to believe it. ' (p. 145)

Both Heroes and Villains and Love also dramatise what

happens to identity when a person refuses to believe in

another's existence. Marianne and Jewel function in a

binary opposition where, after their marriage, Marianne is

in the position of power and regulates Jewel's

understanding of himself. In her attempt to deny that

what she is experiencing is real, she also denies Jewel

'an existence outside the dual being they made while owls

pounced on velvet mice in the forest' (p. 88):

In daylight or firelight, she saw him in two

dimensions, flat and effectless all [his)
...
activities were no more than sporadic tableaux
vivants or random poses with no thread of
continuity to hold them together. (p. 89)

Jewel, meanwhile, exists only as her two-dimensional

construction, since he can define himself only in his

relationship to her:

[He) silently approached her during the butchery

hour and daubed her face with his bloody hands,
an action she construed immediately and
immediately despised, as if he were helplessly
trying to prove his autonomy to her when she
knew all the time he vanished like a phantom at
daybreak, or earlier, at the moment when her
body ceased to define his outlines. (p. 89)

Similarly, towards the end of Love Annabel wonders whether

Lee exists 'at all when she was not beside him to project
Characters 198

her idea of him upon him' (p. 79), and Lee appears to lose

his shadow.

Donally, in Heroes and Villains, enters into commerce

with the Barbarians, the Professors with the Barbarians,

and Zero, in The Passion, with his wives, just as the

reader in a traditional reading of character, Helene

Cixous maintains, enters into 'commerce' with the text:

On condition that he be assured of getting paid

back, that is, recompensed by another who is
sufficiently similar to or different from
him--such that the reader is upheld, by
comparison or in combination with a personage in
the representation that he wishes to have of
himself. ('The Character of "Character, "'
p. 385, my emphasis)

Carter's novels illustrate that this self--that Donally,

the Professors, Zero, and the reader see reflected--is not

a 'real' self, but a fictional self that they desire to

see reflected: self as dominant, as ruler, as

'masculinity incarnate' (The Passion, p. 104), in control,

important all, as an autonomous, unique being.

and most of

Readers of Carter's novels, as we have seen, are

continually reminded that character is a cultural

construct, and a construct of writing and reading; and

that it have to reality. But the

can no pretension

language fiction has the of persuading the

of effect

its to and gives the

reader of unmediated access reality,

illusion before and beyond

of something which pre-exists,

the is drawn by
the text. It is at this point that reader

the force fantasy, to a 'willing

extremely powerful of

disbelief. ' Readers know, and as I have

suspension of
Characters
199

shown, they are continually reminded, that the characters

are not 'real, ' but nevertheless they invited to

are read
them as if they were, and hence themselves
see reflected

as dominant, autonomous, and knowable. It is this

enormously powerful habit, when readers know that a

character is an illusion, that for the illusion

moment of

they are willing to suspend disbelief--always bearing in

mind, of course, that at any point they can withdraw, can

step out of the illusion into rationality (or what appears

to be the 'real' world outside the text).

Carter's novels exploit the power of their readers'

desire to read character in a way which enables them to

comprehend their selves as unique and knowable, but at the

same time the novels warn, as Cixous warns, that if we

read character in this way, we, too, will be playing out a

role:

So long as we do not put aside 'character' and

everything it implies in terms of illusion and
complicity with classical reasoning and the
appropriate economy that such reasoning
supports, we will remain locked up in the
treadmill of reproduction. We will find
ourselves, automatically, in the syndrome of
role-playing. So long as we take to be the
representation of a true subject that which is
only a mask, so long as we ignore the fact that
the 'subject' is an effect of the unconscious
and that it never stops producing the
unconscious--which is unanalysable,
uncharacterizable, we will remain prisoners of
the monotonous machination that turns every
'character' into a mari nette. ('The Character
of 'Character, ' p. 387)5?

55 Marionettes favourite, indeed an obsessive

are a
motif in Carter's fiction, often with close ties to
Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman. ' The marionette in
Characters 200

What Carter's novels signal to the reader is that if we

read character only in 'traditional' terms, become

we all

marionettes. We may appear to be reassured of 'our own

existence independent of history, social construction and

ideology' ('Joyce and the Ideology Character, '
of p. 153),

when in fact, we, too, are only constructions, continually

reinforcing false universals, myths of character, and

established power structures.

The Magic Toyshop, Heroes and Villains, Love, and The

Passion of New Eve propose several important theoretical

points. First, they appear to privilege a modernist mode

of reading, which exposes character as a cultural

construction, and invalidates any notion of essence. This

mode of reading focuses on appearances, that is, it

focuses upon, and makes the reader aware of, the text's

status as fiction and characters' construction in

language. At the same time, though, Carter's novels

continue to valorise, whilst criticising, a 'realist' mode

of reading character in order to comment upon the ways we

read each other and the ways we read the world. By

encouraging both of these incompatible modes of reading,

Carter's 'post-modernist' texts suggest, not that reality

is unrepresentable, but that the very codes which the

modernist are reality. Carter is not

reading exposes

simply that is coded, but that there

suggesting everything

hero falls in love

Hoffmann's story comes to life when the
with her and believes her to be real.
Characters 201

is no distinction between what is coded and what is real;

therefore, in order to appear to know anything, we have to

rely upon certain reading conventions which do make some

distinctions, whilst retaining the awareness that these

distinctions are not fixed or universal. Her novels are

structured around these two poles.

Carter's fiction may not change reading conventions

by exposing them, but it may change the reader's

understanding of his/her position as reader. By showing

how we construct ourselves in the same way as we construct

character, and by exposing the power structures which are

dependent upon this mode of reading, Carter has created

not so much a model as a working theory with which to

comment upon the world, and challenge other power

structures which rely upon the dominator/dominated

hierarchy. This theory has obvious political

ramifications, particularly with regard to feminism, and

the following chapter will return to The Passion of New

Eve in order to discuss this issue.

 CHAPTER 4

THE CHARACTER OF 'WOMAN' AND THE QUESTION OF PORNOGRAPHY

IN 'THE PASSION OF NEW EVE' AND 'THE SADEIAN WOMAN'

'Women' suffer from an extraordinary weight

...
of characterisation.

Denise Riley'

Masculine and feminine are correlatives which

involve one another. I am sure of that--the
quality and its negation are locked in
necessity. But what the nature of masculine and
the nature of feminine might be, whether they
involve male and female that I do not know.
...
Angela Carter2

Denise Riley, 'Am I That Name? ' Feminism and the

(London: Macmillan, 1988),
Category of 'Women' in History
p. 16.
2 Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve, pp. 149-50.
The Character of 'Woman' 203

At the end of the previous chapter I suggested that

the ways in which Carter's novels challenge reading

conventions governing the status of character generate a

'working theory' which has the potential to reflect upon

the world and to challenge particular political

institutions which rely upon the dominator/dominated

duality. This chapter will focus on how The Passion of

New Eve extends the argument regarding the cultural

construction of character by using the same techniques to

explore and expose a related construction, that of

'femininity. ' I will complement my reading of The Passion

with frequent references to Carter's non-fictional text,

The Sadeian Woman, especially with regard to an

exploration of the question of pornography in Carter's

work, and pornography's role in feminist politics.

However, I wish to identify myself with Lorna Sage's

position in regard to this text:

It be misleading to suggest that the

would ...
politics are separable from, or prior to, the
image and image breaking of the fiction.
making
Nevertheless The Sadeian Woman['s] ...
... the
forceful and cruelly explicit reading of
codes of pornography may help to provide a
in the strategies of her fiction
context which
can be better understood.

Carter's use of what many critics have defined as

pornographic and the descriptions of violent sex

material,

which recur throughout her work, have caused considerable

3 Biography, 14,
Lorna Sage, Dictionary of Literary
'British Novelists Since 1960' (Detroit, Michigan:
Brucculi Clark, 1983), pp. 205-12 (p. 212).
The Character of 'Woman' 204

controversy, which will be documented in the second half

of this chapter.

Just as Carter's novels ask 'what does character

"name"?, ' so, The Passion foregrounds a central feminist

question, which is, for example, the starting point for

Simone de Beauvoir's seminal work, The Second Sex, 'what

is a woman? '4 Carter discusses her own interest in the

'questioning of the nature of [her] reality as a woman' in

her article, 'Notes from the Front Line, ' where she

describes The Passion as an 'anti-mythic novel' and 'a

feminist tract about the social creation of femininity. '5

In order to begin to answer this question Carter's novel

explores a basic distinction which underlies contemporary

feminist theory, the distinction between biological sex

4 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated and

edited by H. M. Parshley (1949) (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), p. 15. It is worth comparing Carter's work to the
fiction and theoretical writing of Monique Wittig, who
claims, in her article 'One is not Born a Woman, ' (a title
taken directly from de Beauvoir's The Second Sex), in
Feminist Issues, 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1981), 47-54, that 'what
makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man'
(p. 53). Wittig wants to abolish the very notion of
'woman. '

5 Carter, 'Notes from the Front Line, ' in On Gender

and Writing, by Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora,
edited
1983), 71). Several critics have
pp. 69-77 (p. 70 and p.
the in which Carter's work, in
commented upon ways
particular The Passion, questions accepted notions of
'femininity' Carter's comments from
and several choose
'Notes from the Front Line' article as a means of
introduction. See for Gina Wisker, 'Winged Women
example,
Angela Carter, ' in Ideas
and Werewolves: How do we Read
and Production: A Journal in the History of Ideas, Issue
four: Poetics (1986), 87-98; and Susan Rubin Suleiman,
'(Re)writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female
Eroticism, ' in The Female Body in Western Culture:
Contemporary Perspectives, by Suleiman (Cambridge,
edited
Massachusetts: Press, 1986), pp. 7-29.
Harvard University
The Character of 'Woman' 205

and culturally constructed gender. Carter describes this

distinction clearly in The Sadeian Woman, where she

describes women's oppression as a cultural, and therefore

changeable, condition:

There is the unarguable fact of sexual

differentiation; but, separate from it and only
partially derived from it, are the behavioural
modes of masculine and feminine, which are
culturally defined variables translated in the
language of common usage to the statug of
universals. (The Sadeian Woman, p. 6)

Carter argues that what defines us as either masculine or

feminine is a set of culturally defined codes, 'only

partially derived from' the distinct biological

differences between the sexes, which have been

'translated' into 'universal' truths. The Passion is an

attempt to examine the social fictions which define

gender, and hence which regulate our lives. It also

explores the very process of translation by which social

codes function as universal truths, and lose their status

as codes. The Passion portrays Woman; that is, it

presents a series of recognisable gender stereotypes which

6 Wittig, in
Carter shares this belief with who,
'Paradigm, ' in Homosexualities and French Literature,
edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1979) pp. 114-21, argues
similarly:

The fundamental difference, any fundamental

difference (including sexual difference) between
categories of individuals, any difference
constituting of opposition, is a
concepts
difference belonging to a political, economic,
ideological order. (p. 115)
The Character of 'Woman' 206

has defined Woman; 7 it

society as uses and stresses the

seductive power of these stereotypes which appear to be

dictated by 'universal truths, ' but it simultaneously

prevents us from relating to these characters not only by

denouncing them as artificial constructions but also by

showing that they are totally unrealistic role models

which could only have been constructed by and for men.

Ricarda Schmidt summarises The Passion as a novel in which

'women's subjectivity is shown to be de-formed by the

femininity'; 8
social power of patriarchal stereotypes of

this novel exploits the power of these stereotypes, in the

same way as it exploits the power of 'realist' notions of

character, in order to expose myths of femininity and also

shows how these myths have been created and perpetuated.

The Passion's procedures closely resemble a theory

put forward by Denise Riley in her book, 'Am I that Name? '

Riley argues that:

It is to suggest that 'women' don't

compatible
a politics of 'as if
exist--while maintaining
they the world behaves as if
existed'--since
they did.... Such challenges to
unambiguously
'how can throw sand in the eyes of
women are'
the founding categorisations and attributions,

7 Like the term 'character' in the previous chapter,

the term signifies, is the
the term 'woman, ' and whatever
a capital 'W'
issue under debate. I shall use Woman with
to refer to the definition of what a
accepted universal
'should be, ' as defined by patriarchal culture and
woman
dependent in an essential femininity; and
upon a belief
lower to denote individual women, their sense
woman, case,
of self-identity, and their experiences.

8 Subject in
Ricarda Schmidt, 'The Journey of the
' in Textual Practice, 3, no. 1
Angela Carter's Fiction,
(Spring 1989), 56-75 (p. 73).
The Character of 'Woman' 207

ideally disorientating them. ' ('Am I That

Name? ' p. 112)9

Riley also admits the risk involved in this strategy,

'that the very iteration of the afflicted category serves,

maliciously, not to undo it but to underwrite it. ' She

insists, however, that 'a category may be least

at

conceptually shaken if it is challenged and refurbished,

instead of only being perversely strengthened by

repetition' ('Am I That Name? ' pp. 112 and 113

respectively). This is a risk, of course, that Carter's

texts take again and again, and one which has raised

serious criticisms from feminist critics, as Gina Wisker

points out:

She aims to expose the social and cultural myths

which condition and control us. That she adopts
the content and form of many of these myths in
the demythologising process is both her strength
and, for some readers, her weakness. ('Winged
Women and Werewolves, ' p. 88)

The myth of Woman asserts that the female body

determines what Woman is. Carter's novel does not avoid

9
Riley extends the argument which revolves around
the word 'Woman, ' to include 'women, ' arguing 'that we
can't bracket off Woman, whose capital letter has
either
long alerted to her dangers, or the more modest lower-
us
case "woman", while leaving unexamined the ordinary,
innocent-sounding "women"' (p. 1). 'Women, ' she claims is
'a volatile collectivity in female persons can be
which
very differently positioned, so that the apparent
continuity of the subject of "women" isn't to be relied
on; "women" is both synchronically and diachronically
erratic as a collectivity, while for the individual,
"being a woman" is also inconstant, and can't provide an
ontological foundation' (p. 2).
The Character of 'Woman' 208

or dismiss the problems posed by the material nature of

distinct male and female bodies in determining 10

gender;

by describing two sex changes, both from male to female,

The Passion includes a discussion about whether it is

biological difference or cultural construction which

defines femininity. One of the aims of this novel is to

reveal, by means of exaggeration and parody, the heavy

burden of metaphor and imagery imposed upon the female

body to show not that any essential womanliness is located

there, but that the very ways in which we read our bodies

11 For Mother Evelyn

are coded. example, castrates and

turns him into Eve, 'a perfect specimen of womanhood'

(p. 68). His sex change, which Sophia refers to as

'psycho-surgery' (p. 68), is in two parts. The first part

involves two months of plastic surgery which transform

'him' into 'her, ' biologically, but this is insufficient

10 Carter is school of feminism

arguing against a
which relies upon the body as a sign of the essential
differences between men and women. For many feminists
has always been lacking is a due recognition of the
what
specificity of women's bodies, and women's experience of
their bodies. One recent and excellent book on this
subject is Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism,
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1989). Many
and Difference
contemporary novelists also depend upon the specificity of
the female body, the maternal body, in order to
especially
define Emma Tennant's Alice Fell (1980) (London:
women.
Picador, 1982) Puffball (1980) (London:
and Fay Weldon's
Coronet Books, 1981) both make pregnancy and childbirth a
issue associated with 'Mother
central where women are
nature. '

11
Monique Wittig accomplish the same to
attempts
goal by refusing to use the female body as a metaphor.
See Dianne Griffin Crowder, 'Amazons and Mothers? Monique
Women's Writing, ' in
Wittig, Helene Cixous and Theories of
Contemporary Literature, XXIV, No. 2 (1983), 117-44
(P. 119).
The Character of 'Woman' 209

in itself, and has to be followed by psychological

'programming' to instil stereotypical 'feminine'

qualities. The programming, then, is designed to enable

him/her to 'adjust to [his/her] new shape' (p. 72), or, in

other words, to read his/her new body. The dramatisation

of the separation of biological sex and the conventions by

means of which this sex is read allow the text to comment

ironically upon, among other things, the cultural media

which constantly project particular images of women. The

programming involves, for example, the screening of role

models for Eve which include some of Tristessa's movies

depicting the pain and suffering of womanhood, and

videotapes of

single Virgin and Child that had ever been

every
painted in the entire history of Western
European upon my curving wall in
art, projected
real-life colours and blown up to larger than
life-size, accompanied by a sound track composed
of gurgling babies and the murmuring of
contented mothers. (p. 72, my emphasis)

The of this description highlights the

sheer excess

the (if Evelyn) sees all of these

absurdity of project

than has ever been seen by any

s/he will see more

individual of either sex), but it also emphasises our

images These images

culture's obsession with of women.

are from both 'high' and 'low' culture, their colours, we

informed, but their size is grossly

are appear correct

The images Virgin and Child, for example,

exaggerated. of

'blown larger than life-size, ' an expansion which

are up

as symbols, but
not only parodies their artificial status

impossibility measuring up to
also stresses the of ever
The Character of 'Woman' 210

such unreasonable role models. Another video tape,

featuring 'non-phallic imagery such as sea anemones

opening and closing; caves, with streams issuing from

them; roses, opening to admit a bee; the sea, the moon'

(p. 72), both exposes and parodies the way in which the

female body is commonly read as fragmented, where the

part, the vagina, synecdochically represents the whole.

This part is extracted from the body, enlarged and

simplified and then presented as the most significant

12 The the imagery
aspect of woman. example also exposes

traditionally associated with the vagina; Carter describes

the significance of such imagery in The Sadeian Woman:

'From this elementary iconography may be derived the whole

metaphysics of sexual differences--man aspires; woman has

no other function than to exist, waiting' (The Sadeian

Woman, p. 4). Our reading of biological sex, or our

reading of the body, this novel maintains, is completely

determined by cultural coding. Hence, like Denise Riley,

The Passion claims that, "'the body" is never above--or

below--history' ('Am I That Name? ' p. 104).

Mother, Sophia tells Evelyn, believes that 'a change

in the the essence' (p. 68),

appearance will restructure

but Eve(lyn)'s new body, without his/her willing

in which define it,

suspension of belief the social codes

does transform him/her into Eve(lyn) is only

not a woman.

12 Carter to describe how

uses these very words
is in graffiti, in The Sadeian Woman,
woman represented
p. 4.
The Character of 'Woman' 211

too aware of the difference between his/her body and sense

of self, and also realises that this might be a common

condition: 'Although I was a woman, I was now also

passing for a woman, but, then, many women born spend

their whole lives in just such imitations' (p. 101). 13

This also, of course, causes a problem for the critic who

cannot simply use the names Eve or Evelyn, or a single

pronoun: all of these need to be qualified, since

Eve(lyn) is a split subject, man and woman, and therefore

neither man nor woman.

Tristessa also represents a divided identity, whose

body is male but whose sense of self personifies the myth

of culturally constructed femininity. Tristessa, Susan

Suleiman claims, 'has the physical appendages of maleness

even while continuing to manifest the famous signs, and

beauty, of her quintessential femininity' (The Female Body

in Western Culture, p. 27). Lilith informs Eve that, many

years before, Tristessa had begged Mother to change his

13 to
David Punter emphasises the misery attaching
this division of the female self in 'Angela Carter:
Supersessions of the Masculine, ' in Critique: Studies in
Modern Fiction, 25, No. 4 (1984), 209-22:

What, it seems, the new Eve does is experience,

on behalf of the world, the wrench and
dislocation which is at the heart of woman's
relationship with herself in a world riddled
with masculine power-structures: inner self
forced apart from the subject of self-
presentation, an awareness of hollowness, and
disbelief that this self-on-view can be taken as
a full representation of the person alongside
the bitter knowledge that it will be, that at
every point the woman is locked into the
metaphysical insult of the masculine gaze.
(p. 216)
The Character of 'Woman' 212

biological sex, 'to match his function to his form'

(p. 173), an operation which Mother declined to perform.

However, Tristessa eventually finds it unnecessary even to

disguise his/her male body:

'At first, ' he said, 'I used to conceal my

genitals in my anus. I would fix them in
position with Scotch tape, so that my mound was
smooth as a young girl's. But when the years
passed and my disguise became my nature, I no
longer troubled myself with these subterfuges.
Once the essence was achieved, the appearance
could take care of itself. ' (p. 141)

This example suggests that there both is, and yet shows

that there cannot be, an essential femininity. The

'essence' of Woman that Tristessa describes is obviously

not something located within the female body, since

Tristessa's body is male, but is, s/he claims, a disguise

which 'became' natural. This point is reinforced when,

just before his death at the hands of the Children's

crusade, Tristessa's physical disguise is removed. Evelyn

explains: 'Before eyes, even though they'd shaved him

my

and the from his face, in all his

scrubbed white paint

head, he into
pared-down integrity of a death's changed

his female (p. 156). Beneath what appears to have

aspect'

been a disguise, however, is only further evidence of

disguise. Tristessa's art--his/her disguise and

performance--becomes his nature, and hence the art/nature

distinction breaks down; and the text simultaneously

that there is essential, femininity,

suggests a natural,

Tristessa and yet shows that what might

which personifies,
The Character of 'Woman' 213

be thought to be essential is impossible, it is

since real

only as convention.

Evelyn, therefore, can have a female body but be

not
a woman; and Tristessa can have a male body, but on the

movie screen can appear to be the perfect Woman, since

s/he signifies a perfect realisation of what patriarchal

convention expects a woman 'should be. '

II

The Passion confronts and explores the power of the

cultural codes which divide humans into two distinct

'castes, ' man and woman. In order to do this it portrays

several versions of what, in a patriarchal world, is

recognised as Woman. The text exhibits the power of the

myth of Woman by offering explanations of how and why this

myth exists, and how difficult it is to break out of the

status quo. It portrays three different exemplifications

of Woman: Tristessa, Leilah and Eve, are all women whose

identities 14 The
have been defined exclusively by men.

remainder of this chapter is divided into two main

sections, one on Tristessa, the other on Leilah, with a

brief transition of Zero in between (I

via an analysis

14 fictional dramatisation of
functions
This as a
the theories images by American feminists;
of of women
relevant work includes Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
(London: Virago, 1977), Mary Ellmann's Thinking about
Women (London: : Virago, 1979), and Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
The Character of 'Woman' 214

shall discuss Eve further in the next chapter). Both

Tristessa and Leilah represent explorations of Woman as

constructs of male desire, and both exemplify the

degradation of Woman; there are, however, important

differences between them.

Tristessa. Enigma. Illusion. Woman? Ah!

(p. 6)

In the world portrayed by The Passion Tristessa

personifies the essence of Woman, defined exclusively by

male fantasies:

That was why he had been the perfect man's

woman! He had made himself the shrine of his
own desires, had made of himself the only woman
he could have loved! If a woman is indeed
beautiful only in so far as she incarnates most
completely the secret aspirations of man, no
wonder Tristessa had been able to become the
most beautiful woman in the world. (pp. 128-29)

Tristessa represents Woman as mysterious object of

is 15 She16
desire, but an object which unavailable.

encompasses several contradictory stereotypes, and, as

the of Woman that is

such, represents very ambiguity

into the is both Woman as 'Madonna, '

written myth: she

15 to be modelled upon Greta Garbo

Tristessa appears
Marjorie Rosen claims, in
and Marlene Dietrich who,
American Dream (New
Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the
York: Avon, 1973), 'that enduring fame
shared special
incarnations of all that is
which they gained as enigmatic
mysterious to man--all that he wants to conquer,
subjugate, and destroy. Divinely untouchable, often
unworldly, their lay in their denial of that
allure
humdrum destiny reserved for woman' (p. 169).

16 I to Tristessa as 'she' and Evelyn as

shall refer
'he' even though they are biologically the opposite.
The Character of 'Woman' 215

'"The most beautiful woman in the world"' (p. 5), to be

looked at but never touched, yet is also Woman as 'Whore, '

who functions in 'the celluloid brothel of the cinema,

where merchandise may be eyed endlessly but never

purchased' (The Sadeian woman, p. 60). Ricarda Schmidt

points out Tristessa's likeness to de Sade's Justine,

where both are symbols of 'self-pitying suffering, a

masochism that corresponds to male sadistic pleasure'

('The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 61). Schmidt also

recalls that Tristessa's last name, de St Ange,

corresponds to a character in de Sade's Philosophie dans

le boudour, Madame de Saint-Arge, the product of male

fantasy' who 'teaches Sadism, just as Tristessa's

suffering taught sadism to young Evelyn' ('The Journey of

the Subject, ' p. 64). Tristessa is portrayed as a product

of the male gaze, constructed via a reflection in both a

mirror and a movie screen: she describes how she became

Tristessa, saying, 'She invaded the mirror like an army

with banners; entered me through my eyes' (p. 151); and

she

she is literally a projected image on the cinema screen,

reflecting her audience want to see (p. 118).

what

Tristessa, as I have argued in the previous chapter, makes

no pretence to and the name 'Tristessa' names not

reality,

a person but a construction. She is real only as a

fantasy--'You had turned yourself into an

projection of

object lucid the objects you made from glass; and

as as

this object was, itself, an idea' (p. 129)--and as

film--'You came to me in seven veils of celluloid and

The Character of 'Woman' 216

demonstrated, in your incomparable tears, every kitsch

excess of the mode of femininity' (p. 71). It is only

because she relinquishes her connection with reality that

Tristessa can realise the impossible role model of Woman.

She is like the marionette, Lady Purple, in Carter's short

story 'The Loves of Lady Purple, ' who 'could become the

quintessence of eroticism, for no woman born would have

dared to be so blatantly seductive. '17 Lady Purple is 'a

metaphysical abstraction of the female' (p. 30), and Linda

Hutcheon has identified her as one who 'does not so much

imitate as distill and intensify the actions of real

women, '18 and this is equally applicable to Tristessa.

Similarly, Eve(lyn) wonders aloud to Tristessa, 'How could

a real woman ever have been so much a woman as you? '

(p. 129). Even Tristessa's body is totally fantasised,

bearing no trace of the physical (it does not matter, for

instance, that she is 'more than six feet tall' (p. 123),

19 The text
and she does not have to hide his genitals).

17 Angela Carter, Fireworks (revised edition), p. 27.

18 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism

(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 32.
19 transvestite
Isabel Allende portrays a similar
character Mimi in the novel Eva Luna (1988) (New
called
York: Bantam Books, 1989). Mimi is a (soap opera)
actress who undergoes a limited amount of plastic surgery
but, out of financial necessity, has to retain his/her
male sexual apparatus. Later in his/her life, when
offered the money to complete the sex change operation,
s/he refuses because s/he had become, male appendages and
all, man's perfect woman. Her male lover claims:

'She the is We all have female.

absolute
something of the androgyne about us, something
male, something female, but she's stripped
The Character of 'Woman' 217

literalises the notion of a fantasy body: for example,

when Evelyn finally meets Tristessa in her glass house in

the desert, he describes her as

nothing so much as her own shadow, worn away to

its present state of tangible insubstantiality
because, perhaps, so many layers of appearances
had been stripped from it by the camera--as if
the camera had stolen, not the soul, but her
body and left behind a presence like an absence
that lived, now, only in a quiet, ghostly,
hypersensitivised world of its own. (p. 123)

Within the fantasy world of the cinema, Tristessa does not

need to undergo a biological sex change, merely to take a

different position in the same set of codes.

The power of the classic Hollywood movie, and

therefore Tristessa's power, is based on the audience's

complete acknowledgement of its artificiality, and this

acknowledged artificiality appears both to frustrate and

yet to facilitate the audience's experience of the film.

It frustrates it by confirming that there can be no

physical relationship between the projected images and the

'real' bodies of members of the audience; and yet it

facilitates the relationship because it encourages the

audience to suspend disbelief and abandon themselves to

the world of fantasy (whilst retaining the knowledge that

it is a fantasy). This, of course, assumes that there are

two distinct fantasy world of film which, like

worlds: a

Tristessa, is a completely artificial construction, and

the fact, 'real' outside the movie, into

world of a world

herself of any vestige of masculinity and built

herself splendid curves. She's totally woman,
adorable. ' (p. 254)
The Character of 'Woman' 218

which the audience step, freely, once the has

movie run
its course. For example, part of Tristessa's is
appeal

erotic, but her audience can make no pretence to possess

her body physically--since her body, as I have is

shown,

so obviously a fantasy--they can only encounter her in her

world. Indeed, Evelyn admits that he 'only loved her

because she was not of this world' (p. 8). This explains

his desire to meet her in a fantasy, 'stark naked, tied,

perhaps to a tree in a midnight forest under the wheeling

stars' (p. 7), and his horror at the picture he is sent by

MGM of 'real' Tristessa 20

a playing golf. Evelyn

emphasises the distinction between the temporary fantasy

world of the film and the 'real' world, away from the

movie screen, when he addresses Tristessa in the following

terms:

You were an illusion in a void. You were the

living image of the entire Platonic shadow show,
an illusion that could fill my own emptiness
with marvellous, imaginary things as long as,
just so long as, the movie lasted, and then all
would all vanish. (p. 110)

The audience, then, are conscious of the

artificiality of the fantasy world of the film; what they

are not conscious of, however, is that the fantasy is an

20
Carter in The Sadeian
makes a similar comment
Woman about Marilyn Monroe:

In herself, this lovely ghost, this zombie, or

woman who has never been completely born as a
woman, only a debased cultural idea of a
as
woman, is appreciated only for her decorative
value.... She is most arousing as a memory or as
a masturbatory fantasy. If she perceives
herself as something else, the contradictions of
her situation destroy her. (p. 70)
will
The Character of 'Woman' 219

ideological construction which fulfils all gender

stereotypes. For example, the audience suspend disbelief

in Tristessa because she is totally artificial--'Her

allure had lain in the tragic and absurd heroism with

which she had denied real life' (p. 7)--but also because

she so completely conforms to the codes which define

Woman. This is an extension of my argument regarding

character in the previous chapter: The Passion

problematises the notion of sexual difference as natural

and absolute. Helene Cixous, in her article on

'character, ' argues that, 'Through "character" is

established the identification circuit with the reader:

the more a "character" fulfils the norms, the better the

reader recognises it and recognises himself. '21 Through

the 'identification circuit' with Tristessa (a character

who fulfils all the 'norms'), the audience feel the

both knowing Tristessa and hence knowing

satisfaction of

themselves. What the do not realize is that they

audience

are projecting their own fantasy on to Tristessa, since

she is a literal example of the projection of male

desires, do this as long as she is pure

and they can only

artifice and has none of the specificity of a real woman.

The 'self' for the audience, then,

that Tristessa reflects

is fantasised Michael Ignatieff's description of

a self:

the late Greta Garbo, perhaps puts this most clearly:

21 "' in
Helene Cixous, 'The Character of "Character,
New Literary History, 5 (1974), 383-402 (p. 385).
The Character of 'Woman' 220

She was the mirror of our illusions, casting

back upon us our best images of ourselves.... In
the company of Garbo's image, everyone could
return to some instant they felt themselves to
be beautiful or handsome. (my emphasis)

Evelyn describes how he went towards Tristessa 'as towards

my own face in a magnetic mirror' (p. 110), where the

magnetic pull emphasises the seductive qualities of

stereotypes which offer the illusion of sameness, and draw

the audience towards them. The Passion claims, therefore,

that the codes with which the audience construct Tristessa

are the same as the codes with which the audience

construct themselves and their gender--male or female.

Similarly, the aim of classic Hollywood films, like

the aim of many nineteenth-century 'realist' novelists,

discussed in the previous chapter, was to offer the

illusion of direct access to reality; both mediums often

appear to escape representation only because they are

ideological The film world, then,

completely constructs.

to be 'true' to the audience, even though they

may appear

know that it is not real; and it is this paradox which

the totally world of the film to appear

allows artificial

to the fragmented 'real' world outside. In this

elucidate

22 'Garbo--the mirror of our

Michael Ignatieff,
illusions' in the Observer, 22 April 1990,
(Obituary),
p. 17.

Several the similarity between

critics mention
Tristessa See for Paddy Beesley's
and Garbo. example,
' New Statesman, 25 March
review of The Passion, 'Be Bad,
1977, Tristessa as a 'Garbo-like
p. 407, where he describes
screen L. B. Mittleman in World Literature
goddess'; in
Today, 52 (Spring 1978), 294; Susan Rubin Suleiman,
and
The Female Body in Western Culture, claims 'the cultural
Greta Garbo' (p. 25).
referent for Tristessa is obviously
The Character of 'Woman' 221

way, the film world appears to be more real than reality,

and to penetrate to the heart of the mystery, and

miseries, of 'life. ' Both worlds, then, both fact and

fantasy, can be shown to be constructed out of the same

codes--indeed, The Passion suggests that there are only

codes, and, therefore, that these codes are reality--but

the novel appears to suggest that unless the codes are

self-consciously acknowledged as codes, the distinction

between fact and fantasy will appear unproblematic, and

the illusory world, which is constructed out of male

desire, will continue to dominate.

Jean-Frangois Lyotard explains this process, in a

discussion of current trends in literature, painting and

the cinema, in The Postmodern Condition. He compares

literature and film and stresses film's superiority

'whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent' and

preserve the codes which deny the status of the projected

image as image, in order to appear to give direct access

to 'reality. ' By doing this, it enables the viewer

to arrive consciousness of his

the own
easily at
identity approval which he the
as well as
thereby receives from others--since such
of images and sequences constitute a
structures
of them. This is
communication code among all
the of reality, or if one
the way effects 23
prefers, the fantasies of realism, multiply.

23 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition: The

Jean-Francois
A Report (Minneapolis: University of
on Knowledge,
Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 74. Lyotard also comments upon
the like Carter, attempt to
fate of artists who do,
challenge the 'rules, ' perhaps denying the therapeutic
reasons for
process. This comment may also suggest
Carter's lack of popularity:
The Character of 'Woman' 222

The Passion dramatises this very process of

'communication' between Tristessa and her audience.

Tristessa functions as a symbol of Woman, and of universal

for 24
sorrow a universal audience. She appears to speak

for people, effecting a mutual catharsis, where the

audience perceive her passionate sorrows as their own, or

theirs as her own:

Our Lady of the Sorrows, her face whiter than

her shroud, offered her unmerciful captor a
tribute of the concentrate of all the tears that
had been shed in red-plush flea-pits on five
continents over the sufferings she had mimicked
with such persuasiveness they had achieved a
more perfect degree of authenticity than any she
might have undergone in real life, since half
the world had seen those sufferings and found
them atrocious enough to weep over. Unless she,
all unknowing, had become the focus of their own
pain, the receptacle of all the pain they

As for the artists and writers who question the

rules of plastic and narrative arts and possibly
share their suspicions by circulating their
work, they are destined to have little
credibility in the eyes of those concerned with
'reality' and 'identity'; they have no
guarantee of an audience. (p. 75)

24 Carter from The Passion (and

reworks material
other novels) in her short story, 'The Merchant of
Shadows, ' in London Review of Books, 26 October 1989,
pp. 25-27. This story portrays a slightly different
version of this same symbol of sorrow: a famous, but now
retired Hollywood star (the story contains a similar
sexual 'masquerade' (p. 27)), who 'always carried her
tragedy with her, like a permanent widow's veil giving her
the spooky allure of a born-again princesse lointaine'
(p. 26) (Tristessa is also described as the 'princesse
lointaine' (The Passion, p. 7); therefore the nameless
'heroine' in 'The Merchant' can be seen as a born-again
Tristessa). In Nothing Sacred, Carter writes:

The cabaret singer in her sequin sheath which

but don't touch me, I'm
shrieks 'Look at me
armour-plated' survives as an image of passive
female the lointaine (or,
sexuality, princesse
rather, the putain lointaine). (p"89)
The Character of 'Woman' 223

projected out of their own hearts upon her image

and so had wept for themselves, though they
imagined they wept for Tristessa, and, in this
way, had contrived to deposit all the burdens of
their hearts upon the frail shoulders of the
tragedy queen. (p. 122)

What constitutes this sense of self in which the audience

are confirmed by identifying with a purely ideological

construct? First, each member of the audience is

confirmed in a dominant relation to Tristessa. Since the

fantasy world is totally artificial it therefore has no

place for the non-artificial. The audience have to choose

either the fantasy world or the 'real' world; there is no

compromise position in between. Hence, by suspending

disbelief, they choose to enter the world of fantasy.

Paradoxically, the audience choose to allow themselves to

be dominated, swept away, only because they know that they

are ultimately dominant, and can step out of the fantasy

25 The
into the 'real' world at any moment. viewer

therefore feels in control, s/he is the puppet-master, and

Tristessa fills a passive role, that of the marionette.

Second, but related to my first point, the

closely

audience is manoeuvred into the position of the male gaze.

Just Tristessa's body is shown to be pure fantasy, so

as

the body in to Tristessa, is also

of the viewer, relation

totally No matter the

abstracted and coded as artificial.

biological the audience, in relation

sex of the member of

to Tristessa, the Woman, all members of the

embodiment of

25 in his Observer Obituary for

Michael Ignatieff,
Greta Garbo, comments that 'men could dream of pursuing
her without since by
embarrassment or humiliation,
definition they could not possess her. '
The Character of 'Woman' 224

audience are constructed as instances of an equally

mythical 'Man. ' Contemporary film theory, especially with

regard to the classic Hollywood movies of the 1930's and

1940's--' of which Tristessa's movies are supposed to be

an example--has made this point forcefully. Annette Kuhn

claims, for example:

To possess a woman's sexuality is to possess the

woman; to possess the image of a woman's
sexuality is, however mass-produced the image,
also in some way to possess, to maintain a
degree of control over, women in general. In
this situation the female spectator of images of
women has until recently been faced with a
single option--to identify with the male in the
spectator and to see oman, to see herself, as
2°
an object of desire.

By identifying with Tristessa each member of the audience

reinscribes and reinforces the ideological codes which

construct gender stereotypes. These codes, I shall argue,

are not brought to consciousness by classic Hollywood

movies; therefore what appears to be a cathartic process

of identification and self-knowledge only serves to

strengthen the ideological within which it is

structures

constructed.

What I have referred to as the 'cathartic' qualities

of Tristessa's films, Lyotard would label 'therapeutic'

(The Postmodern Condition, p. 74). Lyotard subsequently

refers to ideological constructs, those

purely artificial

which represent the complete submission to

most

convention, as 'pornographic':

26 Power of the Image: Essays on

Annette Kuhn, The
Representation (London: Routledge & Kegan
and Sexuality
Pual, 1985), p. 11.
The Character of 'Woman' 225

Those who refuse to reexamine the rules of art

pursue successful careers in mass conformism by
communicating, by means of the 'correct rules, '
the endemic desire for reality with objects and
situations capable of gratifying it.
Pornography is the use of photography and film
to such an end. (The Postmodern Condition,
p. 75)

The Passion's descriptions of how Tristessa's Hollywood

films function also describe how pornography, in the usual

sense of the word, functions. (Lyotard's broad definition

of 'pornography' would include within its parameters the

more commonly accepted sense of the word). Pornography,

like Tristessa's films, assumes a male reader, or situates

the reader in the position of the male gaze. Similarly,

both pornography and classic Hollywood films rely upon

purely artificial images, and on the acknowledgement that

these images are artificial. This acknowledgement of

artificiality, once again, both frustrates and yet

facilitates the fantasy process. First, it appears to

frustrate, or prevent satisfaction because, as Carter

maintains in The Sadeian Woman, 'however much he (the

to fuck the willing women or men in

reader/viewer] wants

his story, he cannot do so but must be content with some

form of substitute (p. 14). That is, Carter

activity'

argues, the limitations of both pornography and the film

are signalled if the viewer/reader is sexually aroused,

since he is therefore of his own physical body

reminded

which be by interacting with the fantasy

cannot satisfied

body. Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman:

In pornographic literature, the text has a gap

that the reader may, in
left in it on purpose so
imagination, step inside it. But the activity
The Character of 'Woman' 226

the text describes, into which the reader

enters, is not a whole world into which the
reader is absorbed and, as they say, 'taken out
of himself'. It is one basic activity extracted
from the world in its totality in such a way
that the text constantly reminds the reader of
his own troubling self, his own reality. (p. 14)

The Passion suggests this interpretation when Evelyn

refers to Tristessa as the 'most haunting of paradoxes,

that recipe for perennial dissatisfaction' (p. 6).

However, paradoxically, the novel appears to suggest

that it is these very limitations of fantasy experience

which encourage the viewer/reader to suspend disbelief,

and which therefore facilitate a satisfying fantasy

experience. This recalls Walser, the sceptical reporter

in Nights at the Circus, who

was astonished to discover that it was the

limitations of [Fevvers's] act in themselves
that made him briefly contemplate the
unimaginable--that is, the absolute suspension
of disbelief. (p. 17)

Similarly, Evelyn, at the opening of The Passion, comments

upon the bad quality of the film he is watching, but also

explains (addressing Tristessa) that this film, which

constantly announces itself as old film, makes Tristessa

more convincing:

The film and scratched, as if the

stock was old
made visible in
desolating passage of time were
the the screen, audible in the worn
rain upon
stuttering of the sound track, yet these
erosions of temporality only enhanced your
luminous since they made it all the
presence
more forlorn, the more precarious your specious
triumph over time. (p. 5)

Rather than the codes which construct the

exposing

viewer/reader's fantasy experience, then, the limitations

encourage the 'substitute activity, ' or masturbatory

The Character of 'Woman' 227

fantasy. (In some ways this activity may be thought of as

superior to intercourse since it has none of the

limitations or threats of the real, that is, a woman's

body with its own specificity. Annette Kuhn writes:

The spectator's fantasy is given free rein: in
one sense, there is no risk of
disappointment--he is quite safe because it is
only a picture and the woman in it will never,
in real life, turn him down or make demands
which he cannot satisfy. (The Power of the
Image, p. 42))

That is, by making the viewer/reader aware of the physical

reality of his body and hence signalling the fantasy as

fantasy, the film or text only reinforces the already

acknowledged artificiality of the fantasy process.

My interpretation of The Passion, therefore, to some

extent contradicts Carter's argument in The Sadeian Woman,

where she claims that the desires of the reader of

pornography 'are short-circuited by the fantastic nature

of the gratification promised by the text, which denies to

flesh all its intransigence' (p. 15). Carter also, and

contradictorily, argues that pornography functions as a

'safety (The Sadeian Woman, p. 19), and it is this

valve'

function the of Tristessa's films fulfil

which experience

so perfectly. Indeed, The Passion appears to me to argue

that dissatisfaction produced by film or

satisfaction and

pornography intimately since if it weren't

are related,

for the dissatisfaction by the fact that physical

produced

intercourse take there would be no

cannot place,

from the masturbatory fantasy.

possibility of satisfaction
The Character of 'Woman' 228

Hence, Tristessa's films and pornography do offer a

'whole world into which the reader is absorbed, and ...
"taken out of himself, "' since they do not signal any

self-conscious awareness of the codes from which they, and

their audience, are constructed. The masturbatory

experience is totally self-centred, and, since it does not

have to take into account the 'otherness' of the other, it

goes uninterrupted, and is completely satisfying (hence

its 'therapeutic' value). Tristessa represents such a

masturbatory fantasy: she has none of the specificity of

a real woman, since she is a passive image, and hence

poses no threat to the fulfilment of the fantasy, and to

the reinscription of the myth of Woman. Tristessa's

films, then, like pornography, serve to reinforce the

prevailing system of values and ideas' (The Sadeian Woman,

p. 18) in patriarchal society. I would also argue that in

The Passion Carter does not privilege pornographic

representation over other forms of sexual representation;

rather, I would agree with Annette Kuhn when she argues:

A deconstruction insists that

of pornography ...
is after all special, is not a
pornography not
that it
privileged order of representation;
its many of its
shares many of modes of address,
codes and conventions, with representations
looked as a 'problem' in the
which are not upon
is. (The Power of the Image,
way pornography
p. 22)

The Passion that other forms, in this case

suggests some

Hollywood but by implication all forms of mass

movies

media productions conform totally to stereotypes,

which
The Character of 'Woman' 229

may actually, because of their ubiquitousness and seeming

ordinariness, be more dangerous than pornography.

III

The Passion also dramatises the possibility of using

the power of the codes which construct gender against

themselves, if the distinction between fact and fiction

were to be dissolved or shown to be untenable. Zero, for

example, believes that during 'a revival of Emma

Bovary, '27 Tristessa was able to function independently of

her fantasy world, and intervene in the 'real' world with

27 is
This
another example of the self-consciousness
of Carter's writing, where intertextual elements reflect
the issues discussed in the text: Flaubert's Emma Bovary
is a novel concerned with a fantasising woman; it
demonstrates what happens when the distinction between
fact and fantasy breaks down.

The Passion might be read as a commentary upon the

similar to the novel form in the late
critical responses
eighteenth century and to Hollywood films in the twentieth
century, specifically as they affect a predominantly
female audience. Terry Lovell in Consuming Fiction
(London: Verso, 1987), has compared the two, claiming
that during the period 1790 to 1820:

The literary credentials of the novel were at

their lowest The moral panic it
point....
occasioned in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century was merely the first of a series which
occurred whenever a new cultural commodity made
its debut. It was repeated in the twentieth
television, both of
century over cinema and
as culturally debased and as
which were attacked
tending to corrupt. (p. 8)
The Character of 'Woman' 230

'real' 28
her body. Zero believes that, in doing so, she

'blasted his seed, ' rendering him sterile:

Tristessa's eyes, eyes of a stag about to be

gralloched, had fixed directly upon his and held
them.... He'd felt a sudden, sharp, searing pain
in his balls. With visionary certainty, he'd
known the cause of his sterility. (p. 104)

The distinction between fact and fantasy is dissolved in

Zero's imagination29 and the fantasy is no longer

contained safely within the world upon the screen. Zero

is unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy because

he is not a typical but an exceptional member of the

audience: he comprises the complete repertoire of the

codes which define the myth of Man. Tristessa, then, is

his double, she is the Femininity incarnate to his

'Masculinity incarnate' (p. 104), and, like The Count and

the black pimp in The Infernal Desire Machines, one is

terrorised by the other: in this case Zero is powerfully

28 Zero associates Tristessa another female

with
stereotype, that of the witch or sorceress who can cast a
spell Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex,
over men.
writes, 'Woman is dedicated to magic. Alain said that
magic is spirit drooping [sic] down among things; an
is instead of being produced by an
action magical when,
agent, it from something passive' (p. 196).
emanates
in Venus, p. 169, writes 'On
Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn
screen, the of all cast shadows as
most passive women
mythological Circes. Garbo and Dietrich. '

29 Shaman in Nights
the at
See also the figure of
the Circus, distinction between
who 'made no categorical
be that, for all the
seeing and believing. It could said
no difference between
peoples of his region, there existed
fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magic realism'
(p. 260).
The Character of 'Woman' 231

drawn toward Tristessa and 30

yet repelled. Michael

Ignatieff, in his obituary on Greta Garbo, that

claims

'Fans secretly despise the thing they adore, for the very
fact that it prostitutes itself to their '
admiration, and

Zero's fascination with/hatred of Tristessa to

seems me to

present this fan-idol relationship taken to extreme.

Zero, therefore, does not suspend disbelief in Tristessa

since there is no element of disbelief in his relationship

to the fantasy: he believes that the film image of

Tristessa has an independent, 'real' existence. Zero is

threatened by Tristessa, and similarly, his suspicions are

aroused by Eve, who not only has a perfect body, but also

'began to behave too much like a woman' (p. 101). Neither

of these powerful, apparently perfect examples of Woman,

reflect his own sense of a dominant self. Zero worries

that Eve 'might be too much of a woman for him, ' and he

Tristessa 'Queen (p. 101). 31 In this

calls of Dykes' way,

30 Carter's
Doubles are a recurrent motif throughout
work. Paulina Palmer, for example, in 'From "Coded
Mannequin" to Bird Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight, '
Women Reading Women's Writing, edited by Sue Roe
(Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 179-205, (pp. 184-85),
points out the way in which the many doubles in The Magic
Toyshop challenge the notion of unified character.
31 see
This not is
only true for gender relations:
for instance the baby in The Infernal Desire Machines,
whose smile was '"too lifelike"' (p. 19). Elaine Jordan,
in 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions, '
in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction, edited
by Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), pp. 19-40
(p. 32), points out the importance to The Infernal Desire
Machines of Freud's meditation on 'The Uncanny' provoked
by E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman, ' both of which focus
on the is too lifelike. The idea
suspicion of whatever
recurs in Nights Circus to account for
again at the
Walser's reaction to Fevvers's trapeze act:
The Character of 'Woman' 232

the novel makes clear that the convention is that the

convention of Woman should not be perfectly realised in

the 'real' world. Built into the myth of Woman is a rule

that the role models the images of Women portray should be

unrealisable; it is the very impossibility of conforming

to the so-called 'ideal' which keeps women in their

oppressed place. Tristessa does epitomize the very myth

of Woman, but appears to be safely contained within the

fantasy world of film, over which the audience assume

control. In other words, so long as the distinction

between fantasy and fact is maintained, however powerful

or perfect Tristessa appears, she always assumes a passive

role. In this way Hollywood films pretend to offer women

power but keep control over this power. When the

distinction between the fantasy world and the 'real' world

is put in question, however, the power of the stereotype

Woman poses a threat to the very structures within which

it is constructed. Hence, Zero is not confirmed in a

dominant role by his relationship to Tristessa, and he

does not see himself reflected as Man, since, in his

imagination, she has escaped the safe confines of the

screen.

In his watchingbox, her through

red-plush press
his he of dancers
thought he had
opera-glasses,
seen in Bangkok, presenting with their plumed,
and angular, hieratic
gilded, mirrored surfaces
infinitely persuasive illusions
movements, more
of the airy creation than this over-literal
barmaid before him. 'She tries too damn'
winged
hard, ' he scribbled. (pp. 15-16)
The Character of 'Woman' 233

IV

Sexual relations between men and women always

render explicit the nature of social relations
in the society in which they take place and, if
described explicitly, will form a critique of
those relations. (The Sadeian Woman, p. 20)

In its portrayal of Evelyn's relationship with Leilah

The Passion extends the usual sense of pornography to show

how pornographic codes structure a particular sexual

relationship in the world portrayed by the text. Carter

takes on the role of what, in The Sadeian Woman, she has

called a 'moral pornographer, ' who, amongst other things,

uses 'pornography as a critique of current relations

between the sexes' (The Sadeian Woman, p. 19). Hence,

Leilah and Evelyn's relationship can be read as a

fictionalised version of her theoretical argument:

When pornography abandons its quality of

existential solitude and moves out of the kitsch
timeless, placeless fantasy and into the
area of
real world, then it loses its function of safety
valve. It begins to comment upon real relations
in the real world. Therefore, the more
pornographic writing acquires the techniques of
real literature, of real art, the more
it is likely to be in that the more
subversive
likely it is to affect the reader's percýtions
(The Sadeian Woman, p. 19)
of the world.

The Passion Evelyn Leilah's relationship to show

uses and

how the unchallenged ideological codes which are posited

32 in Contemporary Women's Fiction:

Paulina Palmer,
Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory (Jackson:
University 1989), suggests that Margaret
of Mississippi,
Atwood's Bodily Harm (1981) (London: Virago, 1983) adopts
Rennie is exposed to
a similar strategy. Atwood's heroine
and later in the
a collection of sadistic pornography,
'comes its to herself'
novel, to perceive applicability
(Palmer, P. 90).
The Character of 'Woman' 234

and reinforced by Evelyn's Hollywood Cinema experience

carry over into his 'real' relationships, and affect the

way Evelyn reads women and himself. In doing so, the novel

comments upon more general social relations.

Evelyn and Leilah's relationship is described in

pornographic terms. Their relationship in the world

created by the fiction is therefore mirrored by the reader

and text relationship, since readers, like the audience of

one of Tristessa's movies, are invited to suspend

disbelief and enter a fantasy world of what has been

characterised, by several critics, as pornographic

fiction, always bearing in mind, of course, that they can

step back into what appears to be a 'real' world outside

the text, at any point.

First, however, it is important to point out the

controversy caused by Carter's use of pornography in her

writing, and to put this into the context of a much

broader feminist debate over the issue of pornography.

Pornography has recently been accorded a privileged role

in feminist debates about women's oppression, but, as

Michele Grossman it 'has more often served to

comments,

deepen rather than heal the existing rifts between

feminists committed to theorising the complexities of

gender '33 Grossman's article takes much of

and sexuality.

its evidence from called Caught Looking:

a volume

33
Michele Grossman, '"Born to Bleed": Myth,
Carter's "The Bloody
Pornography and Romance in Angela
Chamber, "' in The Minnesota Review, 30/31 (Spring 1988),
148-60 (p. 150).
The Character of 'Woman' 235

Feminism, Pornography Censorship, 34

and which was compiled

by the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (F. A. C. T. ).

This is a book which combines a series of feminist essays

on pornography with a collection of explicit visual

imagery, and which itself represents a challenge to

potential censors. It provides, Grossman explains,

'compelling evidence of the lack of consensus among

contemporary radical feminists on the vexing question of

whether pornography can and should be produced, consumed

and enjoyed by women' ('"Born to Bleed, "' p. 150). Perhaps

one of the first, and certainly one of the most

influential, books to use overt pornographic quotations

'to demonstrate the fascist potential of heterosexual

relations'35 was Kate Millet's Sexual Politics. Millet,

like Carter, uses pornography to exemplify the sheer power

of gender stereotypes.

The pornographic elements in Carter's work, as Gina

Wisker has pointed out, cannot be ignored, since they are

'so excessive, so foregrounded' ("Winged Women and

Werewolves, " p. 97). Indeed, much of the criticism of

Carter's to date discusses this issue.

work available

Most, though not all, of the articles refer specifically

to Carter's rewriting of fairy tales in The Bloody

34 Caught Pornography and

Looking: Feminism,
Censorship (Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1988).

35 Politics, ' in Feminist

Lynne Pearce, 'Sexual
Readings/Feminists Sara Mills, Lynne Pearce, Sue
Reading
Spaull and Elaine Millard (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 18. The whole chapter assesses
Millet's influence feminist movement, pp. 15-50.
upon the
The Character of 'Woman' 236

Chamber; they also, however, rely heavily on Carter's

theoretical writings in The Sadeian Woman, and are often

equally applicable to The Passion. The critics who

champion Carter's use of pornography claim, as she does,

that it forms a vital part of what she has called a

demythologising process: Gina Wisker, for example,

defends Carter's strategy, arguing that its 'usage aids

the expose of pornography which lies behind cultural and

social myths' ("Winged Women and Werewolves, " p. 97).

Carter has written that 'Pornography, like marriage and

the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of

false universalising' (The Sadeian Woman, p. 12), and

Michele Grossman, also relying upon the figure of

marriage, maintains that Carter's texts, whilst not

denying or underestimating the potency and pleasure of

both myth and pornography, 'embody Jane Gallop's principle

of feminist "infidelity": "Infidelity is not outside the

the symbolic patriarchy, but hollows

system of marriage,

it it, from ('"Born to Bleed, "'

out, ruins within"'

p. 153) .

There is no doubt, however, that Carter's use of

pornography is deeply disturbing, and many commentators

find it Annette Kuhn explains some

too dangerous a tool.

of the problems:

The capacity of pornography to provoke gut

distaste, horror, sexual arousal,
reactions--of deal
fear--makes it difficult to with
peculiarly
In the first place, the
analytically.
intellectual distance necessary for analysis
feminist (and
becomes hard to sustain: and also
indeed any other) politics around pornography
The Character of 'Woman' 237

tend to acquire a degree of emotionalism that

" can make the enterprise quite explosive. Any
feminist who ventures to write about pornography
puts herself in an exposed position, therefore.
(The Power of the Image, p. 21)

The argument levelled against Carter's use of pornography

resembles that raised by Denise Riley with regard to the

definition of the category of 'Women, ' that any use of

pornography is necessarily an acknowledgement, which

serves, 'maliciously, not to undo it but to underwrite it'

('Am I That Name? ' p. 112). Patricia Duncker opened the

debate in 1984 with an astute, elegant, highly critical,

and now much quoted article, 'Re-imagining the Fairy

Tales: Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers. '36 Duncker's

argument focuses primarily on Carter's attempts 'to

extract the latent content from the traditional [fairy]

tales, and use it as the beginnings of new stories'37 in

The Bloody Chamber. Some of her comments about

pornography are equally applicable to The Passion, and at

the opening of her article she summarises the novel and

cites it, along with The Sadeian woman, as a precursor of

The Bloody Chamber. Duncker maintains that Carter's use

of pornography only to reinforce rather than

serves

the 'realities desire, aggression, [and]

challenge of male

force' the 'reality of women, [as]

and complementary

('Re-imagining the Fairy Tales,

compliant and submissive'

36 'Re-imagining the Fairy Tales:

Patricia Duncker,
Angela Carter's Bloody Chambers, ' in Literature and
History, 10: 1 (Spring 1984), 3-14.

37 in Interview (London:
John Haffenden, Novelists
Methuen, 1985), p. 84.
The Character of 'Woman' 238

p. 8). Perhaps the most powerful and controversial

assertion in the article is that Carter's heroines,

particularly those in the stories 'The Company of Wolves, '

and 'The Tiger's Bride, ' portray, 'beautifully packaged

and unveiled the ritual disrobing of the willing

...

victim of pornography' (p. 7). This argument has been

taken up by other critics with regard to all of Carter's

fiction. Robert Clark's argument, in 'Angela Carter's

Desire Machine, ' is premised upon the notion that the

ideological power of pornography is 'infinitely greater

than the power of the individual to overcome it, '

claiming, between parentheses, that 'The noose cannot be

used to abolish death by hanging. '38 Clark suggests that

'critical pornography' does not simply reinforce the

deeply sexist codes which it propagates, but also

reinscribes the myth which promotes sexuality to

the acme of pleasure and origin of authentic

significance, while surrounding the experience
with limits and prohibitions, the purpose of
which is to prevent the realization that without
prohibition the prohibited is insignificant.
('Angela Carter's Desire machine, ' p. 153)

Avis Lewallen also believes that Carter (and,

interestingly, the anti-pornographer Andrea Dworkin, who

might be thought of as Carter's antithesis) mistakenly

privileges representation. Lewallen

one aspect of sexual

maintains:

38 Carter's Desire Machine, '

Robert Clark, 'Angela
in Women's Studies--An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, no. 2
(1987), 147-61 (p. 153).
The Character of 'Woman' 239

I would not argue that pornographic

representation is not important, but would say
it must be placed within the context of all
forms of sexual representation. Some of these
forms such as advertisements which utilize
pornographic images, may, by the very fact of
their seemin 'naturalness, ' be more
39
pernicious.

I have already shown, of course, how The Passion exposes

Hollywood film as just such a powerful form of

'pornography. 40 Lewallen reiterates Duncker's arguments,

claiming that Carter fails to escape the binary

oppositions which she uses but condemns, particularly the

'Sadeian framework' of 'fuck or be fucked, ' but also

maintains that, while finding Carter's 'ultimate position

politically untenable, ' she feels that Duncker has

...

overlooked Carter's irony 'which both acknowledges

patriarchal structure and provides a form of critique

against it' ('Wayward Girls but Wicked Women? ' p. 149 and

p. 147 respectively).

Several critics also raise another interesting point

regarding the dangers inherent in the use of pornographic

representations. Paulina Palmer claims that by making the

female heroes of The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains

victims of sexual harassment and rape, Carter

runs the tainting her fiction with the

risk of
attitudes associated with popular genres which
the topic sex and violence for the
exploit of
purpose of titillation, reproducing the

39 but Wicked Women? Girls

Avis Lewallen, 'Wayward
Female Sexuality in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, '
in Perspectives Pornography: Sexuality in film and
on
Literature, by Gary Day and Clive Bloom (New York:
edited
St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 144-58 (p. 145).

40 See p. 224 above.

The Character of 'Woman' 240

chauvinistic cliche that female pleasure is

dependent upon submission and victimisation.
('From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird Woman, ' p. 188,
my emphasis)

Clark compares the effect of Carter's reiteration and

privileging of pornographic models to 'the deep logic of a

society that makes largely useless commodities appear

desirable by first enticing and then restricting access to

them' ('Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' p. 153). And

Lewallen objects to the packaging of the collection of

short stories, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, where she

claims that Carter's name, as editor, in league with a

sexy cover picture, are part of the seductive, and

deceptive, marketing practice which 'signify sexuality as

the subject under scrutiny. '

It is the cover, in what it reveals about the

marketing practices of a feminist publishing
house in relation to the supposed expectations
of its readership, that is especially
interesting. Sexy covers and titles sell books,
even to women. ('Wayward Girls but Wicked
Women? ' p. 144)41

Similar objections were raised to the hard cover British

edition of Black Venus which features a miniature painting

of a nude, mounted as a pendant, with the glass smashed,

lying black And the herself claims to

upon velvet. author

have been offended by the cover of the most recent

41
Nicci Gerrard, in Into the Mainstream (London:
Pandora, 1989), the importance of the image of
stresses
both author and book in today's market:
longer no
Book design, promotion and publicity
the book; they sell Most it.
simply announce
feminist have recently been as effective
presses
as their competitors at carefully
mainstream
image that sell the book.
creating the will
(p. 40)
The Character of 'Woman' 241

American edition of The Sadeian Woman (Pantheon), which

features a masked woman in a black corset, with her

nipples just in view. She is carrying a whip and wearing

black high-button boots. 42 Carter has also commented,
however, even 'sexy covers' and packaging has failed to

sell many books: 'Novels of mine would resurrect

themselves with naked women and tentacular monsters on the

cover, but that didn't do the trick. '43 To use

pornographic models, then, even in the demythologising

business, is a dangerous business, where writers become

known for the possible titillation which their work may

44 Carter being
provide, and risks dubbed, as she was by

Amanda Sebastyen in a review of the Institute of

Contemporary Arts 1987 exhibition, 'the high priestess of

postgraduate porn. º45

42 in The Boston
In an interview with John Engstrom
Globe, 28 October 1988, p. 62, Carter is reported as
saying, 'When I saw that cover I thought, "So much for the
integrity of the American left. "'

43 Let
Angela Carter, '"Fools are my theme, satire
be my song, "' Vector, 109 (1982), 26-36 (p. 29).
44 Simone
Interestingly, one of the early covers of
de Beauvoir's The Second Sex featured a nude woman, and
may well have been purchased by many readers because of
its provocative Similarly, Lynne Pearce, in
packaging.
her chapter, 'Sexual Politics, ' in Feminist
Readings/Feminists Reading, suggests that the quotation of
some of the most pornographic scenes from the work of
Henry Miller Mailer in Kate Millet's book
and Norman
Sexual Politics 'could have had something to do with
also
the book's instant popular recognition' (p. 18).

45 'The ' in New Socialist

Mannerist Marketplace,
(March 1987), 34-39 (p. 38).
The Character of 'Woman' 242

The risk Carter takes by using pornography, then, is

great, but if the ideological codes which construct the

social myths of Woman and Man are brought to consciousness

and challenged, then Carter will have succeeded in

harnessing not only the power of pornography, but also the

equally impressive power of the anti-pornographers, in her

'demythologising business' ('Notes from the Front Line, '

p. 71) .

The character Leilah represents an exploration of

Woman as an available object of male desire. Evelyn

assumes that he literally acts out his perfect erotic

fantasy and finds sexual fulfilment with a prostitute

called Leilah, but the text shows that the name Leilah,

like the name Tristessa, does not name a person but a

construction of Evelyn's desire. For Evelyn, Leilah

represents Woman as cultural commodity, Woman as

'consumable' (therefore, less than human), both in the

sense for sale and being available to eat:

of available

Evelyn first in the drug-store, are her

what notices,

'tense legs' he compares the legs of

and resilient which

in the (p. 19), and later he describes

racehorses stable'

how 'she herself and became

systematically carnalised

dressed (p. 31). 46 Leilah represents Woman as sex

meat'

46 his/her female body in

Eve(lyn) refers to own
terms: before is forced into his/her
similar s/he
describes how 'Betty
marriage bed with Tristessa, s/he
Boop and Emmeline took hold each one of my ankles and
spread legs that the moist, crimson velvet
my wide, so to
with which I had been scrupulously lined was exhibited
The Character of 'Woman' 243

object: she is a whore, 'the slut of Harlem' (p. 175), but

she also represents Woman as 'victim' (p. 28). She is

Woman as man's possession, 'Leilah, the night's gift ...

the city's gift' (p. 25), and she has been, Evelyn

believes, 'doubly degraded, through her race and through

her (p. 37) 47

sex' .
The force of this particular stereotype is produced

because Leilah fulfils the fantasy expectations of

pornography: she represents Woman as glorified vagina.

Commenting upon images of women in hard core pornography,

Annette Kuhn explains:

The woman in the picture, says this type of

pornography, is anonymous: or rather her
identity resides in her sex--not in her clothes,
nor in her face, nor indeed in any other part of
her body. The vagina in the picture stands for
the enigma of the feminine.... Pornography
conflates femininity with femaleness, femaleness
with female sexuality, and female sexuality with
a particular part of the female anatomy. (The
Power of the Image, p. 39 and p. 40)

Leilah is systematically reduced to her sexual function,

and the novel dramatises the synecdochic process where the

'part, ' the comes to represent her whole body. At

vagina,

the same time, Carter's text situates the reader in the

them all like meat' (pp. 136-37). This is a recurrent

image in Carter's for example, one of Carter's
work, see
'Beauty The Beast, ' 'The Tiger's Bride, '
versions of and
in The Bloody Chamber, Beauty is described as 'the
where
(p. 66). Carter describes her
cold white meat of contract'
between flesh and meat in detail,
view of the differences
in The Sadeian Woman, pp. 137-41.
47
Carter in The Sadeian Woman
uses the same words
both
to describe 1960's joke God is revealed to be
a where
female that 'the Supreme Being
and black. Carter comments
was doubly devalued, by virtue of Her sex and Her race'
(P. 111).
The Character of 'Woman' 244

position of the male gaze, because we as readers witness

Evelyn witnessing Leilah witnessing her transformation

into a product of patriarchal society. The text offers

only Evelyn's, the narrator's, point of view, which is

that of the voyeur. The description functions like

multiple reflections in Leilah's cracked mirror, where the

mirror is patriarchy's, and therefore Evelyn's, text, and

the text of The Passion functions as the reader's mirror:

To watch her dressing herself, putting on her

public face, was to witness an inversion of the
ritual disrobing to which she would later submit
her body she watched me watching the
...
assemblage of all the paraphernalia that only
emphasised the black pluý4 flanks and crimson
slit beneath it. (p. 30)

Leilah is also situated in the position of the male gaze,

voyeuristically viewing herself being watched. She

gradually puts herself together--disguises herself--into

the image that the male gaze desires. She watches Evelyn

watching her 'slip on another pair of the sequinned

48 Carter's interest in mirror images, and the way

figures, particularly women, see themselves reflected can
be seen across her fiction. Carter has also written a
small booklet introducing a collection of postcards of
Frida Kahlo's work, and one of the obvious attractions of
Kahlo for Carter is the way the artist repeatedly
represents her own reflection in the many self-portraits.
Kahlo appears to be the opposite of Leilah who sees
herself as she thinks others see her: the artist see
herself by else's gaze. In Images of
unmediated anyone
Frida Kahlo (London: Redstone, 1989), Carter writes:

it of looking at herself
I think was the process
that her. Because the face in the self-
engaged
is not that of a woman looking at the
portraits
looking the picture; she is not
person at
addressing us. It is the face of a woman
looking herself to the
at herself, subjecting
most intense scrutiny, almost to an
interrogation. (p. 2)
The Character of 'Woman' 245

knickers that function as no more than a decorative and

inadequate parenthesis round [her] sex' (p. 29), 'the

assemblage of all the paraphernalia' that reduce her to an

object: to the 'profane essence' of so-called Woman. The

more clothes she puts on, Evelyn claims, the more she

becomes this essence, an essence which is represented by

the vagina--'the black plush flanks and crimson slit

beneath' (p. 30). Leilah's 'public face, ' then, is in fact

her pubic face.

It is clear from the above example, that Evelyn is

not concerned with any sense of a 'real, ' physical body.

The myth of Woman that pornography iterates does not rely

upon the force of the female body upon the imagination,

but the force of the imagination upon the body. Hence the

'real' body disappears (or loses any reality it might have

had) becomes something to serve male desire. But

and only

the the body as dominant, even though

myth still portrays

the body is by the fantasy of the body.

overshadowed

Evelyn, is of this, and believes that

of course, not aware

he possesses Leilah sexually, that is, that he possesses

her body: he first her in the drugstore, he

when sees

'As her, I determined to have

claims, soon as I saw was

her' (p. 19), he believes that the city

and subsequently

'delivered' her him for his 'pleasure' and his 'bane'

to

(p. 27), that herself to him (p. 26).

and even she gave

However, he to Leilah, because--since

only appears possess

he is impossible: 'I could

never knows her--possession

hardly ' he declares, 'but I

understand a word she said,
The Character of 'Woman' 246

was mad for her and threw myself upon her' (p. 26).

Eve(lyn), at the end of the novel, consciously

acknowledges that this character, whom he called Leilah,

could only have existed in his imagination: 'She can

never have objectively existed, all the time mostly the

projection of the lusts and greed and self-loathing of a

young man called Evelyn' (p. 175). Hence, the name Leilah

does not represent a physical body, but only Evelyn's

masturbatory fantasy (which is also, ironically, how he

sees himself when, later in the novel, Mother has

transformed him into Eve: 'I had become my own

masturbatory fantasy' (p. 75)). Evelyn's particular

fantasy has been generated by Tristessa's portrayal of

Woman as victim: he remembers his sadistic reaction to

her movies, recalling 'the twitch in [his] budding groin

the spectacle Tristessa's suffering always aroused in

of

[him]' (p. 8). The vagina which Evelyn penetrates is

therefore less than the product of his

a physical vagina

imagination, and the self-consciously literary and

pornographic language confirms this: 'My full-fleshed and

voracious beak tore the poisoned wound of love

open

between her thighs, suddenly, suddenly' (p. 25).

Since Leilah represents Evelyn's masturbatory

fantasy, which is totally narcissistic, and negates

Leilah's a real woman, it takes no account

specificity as

for that she is

of her 'otherness. ' He believes, example,

the 'born he imagines her to be; that

victim' (p. 28) that

is he violent games, or a
she a toy with which can play
The Character of 'Woman' 247

pet which he can subject to punishment, which he can leave

tied up all day long, and which fouls the bed (pp. 27-8).

Evelyn therefore believes that he can walk out on her at

any point, just as he could walk out of a Tristessa movie.

When he grows bored with his fantasy he assumes that he

can dispose of it: 'Nothing was too low for me to stoop

to if it meant I could get rid of her' (p. 33). There is,

then, no place within the fantasy for Leilah's idea of

herself; she can only see herself in terms of his fantasy,

a point which is underscored by the fact that we only know

about her from Evelyn's viewpoint. That is, since she is

situated in the position of the male gaze, his desire also

be her desire. 49 Evelyn's how

appears to reading of

Leilah sees herself, then, is completely determined by the

codes of pornography: she not only sees herself as a

fragment of herself, but also reads this part of herself

in specifically coded terms. Built into the myths of

'masculine' 'feminine, ' Carter maintains, in The

and

Sadeian Woman, is the belief that 'Woman is negative.

Between her legs lies nothing but Zero [hence Carter's use

of the in The Passion], the sign for nothing, that

name

49 'Born to Bleed, in ' comments on

Michele Grossman,
the in The Bloody Chamber is in many ways an
ways which
imagination
exploratory challenge to a feminist cultural
that in being
often denies or disguises complicity
by its desires' (p. 148); this
victimised contradictory
I believe, is applicable to The Passion.
comment, equally
The problem 'willing' submission to male
of women's
dominance is the brilliant book by Jessica
subject of a
Benjamin, The Bonds Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism,
of
(New York: Pantheon Books,
and The Problems of Domination
1988). It is the theme of Jenny Diski's novel
also
Nothing Natural (1986) (London: Minerva, 1990).
The Character of 'Woman' 248

only becomes something when the male principle fills it

with meaning' (p. 4). The Passion dramatises the codes

which structure the stereotype. Evelyn casts Leilah as

his negative, his 'other': she is, he informs us, 'a

perfect woman; [who] like the moon only gave reflected

...
light' (p. 34). Her negativity is symbolised by her skin

colour and her fragmented body: 'She was black as my

shadow and I made her lie on her back and parted her legs

like a doctor in order to examine more closely the

her (p. 27). 50 Leilah is

exquisite negative of sex'

portrayed in binary opposition with the male public for

whom she strips and performs (including Evelyn), and

therefore she acts out the role she believes they expect

her to play. Her role is one which Luce Irigaray would

identify as a 'masquerade, ' it is 'what women do in

...

50 This
could be described as a fictional
dramatisation of some of the theories of French feminists,
particularly Luce Irigaray, who see Woman as man's
'other, ' or mirror image. Toril Moi summarising Irigaray
in Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), says:

The woman, for Freud as for other Western

philosophers, becomes a mirror for his own
Irigaray concludes that in our
masculinity.
society representation, and therefore also
social and cultural structures, are productions
of what she sees as a fundamental
hom(m)osexualite. The pun in French is on homo
('man'): the male desire for
('same') and homme
the same. (p. 135)

Paulina Palmer, in Contemporary Women's Fiction,

quoting Luce Irigaray, describes femininity as 'a type of
masquerade in the role of mimic "acting
with woman trapped
out man's contraphobic projects, projections and
productions her desire"' (p. 16) (Irigaray, Speculum of
of
the Other woman translated by Gillian C. Gill (Cornell
University Press, 1985), p. 53. ).
The Character of 'Woman' 249

order to participate in man's desire, but at the cost of

giving up theirs. '51 She, like Zero's wives in this

novel, believes in the role cast for her, since her sense

of self is regulated totally by the male gaze. Evelyn

therefore believes that she believes that, without men to

define her, she is nothing, the zero which her sex

denotes, and she therefore sees her self-value reflected

in terms of the men in her life. This self-value takes

the form of Evelyn's love--'She had mimicked me, she had

become the thing I wanted of her, so that she could make

me love her' (p. 34)--and the economic gain in the form of

'a great many dollars tucked in the top of her stocking'

(p. 30), which she collects from her public performance.

In Evelyn's eyes, then, Leilah becomes the object of

patriarchal desire (which, according to patriarchal

convention, is also her desire): she becomes what she

performs, which is a mirror of Evelyn's illusions, casting

back upon him his best images of himself.

What, then, constitutes Evelyn's best image of

himself? Evelyn into commerce with Leilah, just as

enters

Donally into with the Barbarians in Heroes

enters commerce

the with the text, in

and Villains, and, I suggest, reader

order to confirm his sense of self, and his sense of what

51 Irigaray, 'Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un'

Luce
by Stephen Heath in
(Paris: Minuit 1977), p. 131. Quoted
'Joan Riviere and the masquerade, ' in Formations of
James Donald, and Cora
Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin,
Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986) pp. 45-61 (p. 54).
The Character of 'Woman' 250

a man 'should be. ' For Evelyn, Leilah represents Woman as

commodity, and she confirms his position as socially

dominant 52 Evelyn's
consumer. reading of Leilah as a

glorified vagina consequently, and reassuringly, confirms

him as glorified 'cock': 'She dropped her fur on the

floor, I stripped, both our breathing was clamorous. All

my existence was now gone away into my tumescence; I was

nothing but cock' (p. 25). Evelyn's 'best' image of

himself, therefore, takes the form of a dominant,

stereotypical male; it confirms Evelyn as the master in a

sadistic, master/slave relationship, which his early

exposure to Tristessa's movies has taught him is the

'normal' male condition.

Evelyn suspends disbelief in the fantasy Leilah of

his imagination, and the division between his belief and

yet disbelief is literalised in the text by his portrayal

of two Leilahs: 'The reflected Leilah had a concrete form

and, although this form was perfectly tangible, we all

knew, all three of us in the room, it was another Leilah'

(p. 28). Once Evelyn displays the narcissism of his

again,

fantasy: individual which Leilah may have

any specificity

represented is by Leilah-as-fantasy--'she brought

annulled

52 Woman Carter describes pornography

In The Sadeian
flesh into (p. 13); this
as that which 'turns the word'
link between flesh highlights another link,
the and words
between literature and meat--since both are consumables.
Carter the consumer, enters the
claims that 'the reader,
dominance which affords him
picture; reflecting the social
the opportunity to purchase the flesh of other people as
if it were meat' (p. 14).
The Character of 'Woman' 251

into being a Leilah who lived only in the not-world of the

mirror and then became her own reflection' (p. 28).

Evelyn, of course, only ever sees one himself; the
of

illusion created by the male gaze is necessarily an

illusion of oneness, because the illusion is what man

wants to see in order to read and know himself. The

artificial Leilah so completely fulfils Evelyn's fantasy,

and fulfils the stereotype, that, by identifying with her,

he appears to know both her and know himself. That is, he

sees himself reflected in Leilah, as whole, and unique,

independent of history, social construction and ideology:

'So, together, we entered the same reverie, the self-

created, self-perpetuating, solipsistic world of the woman

watching herself being watched in a mirror' (p. 30).

Evelyn and Leilah appear to exist in a fantasy world cut

off from 'reality, '53 which is dramatised by Evelyn's

descriptions of their immunity from the violence of New

York:

But such was the pentacle in which she walked

that nobody seemed able to see her but I and, as
if I, too, had become part of her miracle, I
walked unmolested, also, although the dark

53
Once again, Evelyn and Leilah's relationship
appears to be a dramatised version of a theory she puts
forward in The Sadeian Woman, where she claims that:

The pornographer, in of himself, becomes a

spite
that the friction
metaphysician when he states
of the in orifice is the supreme matter of
penis
the for the world is well lost; as
world, which
he says the vanishes. (p. 16)
so, world
The Character of 'Woman' 252

pageant of the night unrolled around me in the

usual fashion. (p. 22)54

The immunity comes to a sudden end once the relationship

is over, and as Evelyn tries to leave Manhattan, less than

fifty yards from the car park, he 'was set upon by young

blacks' (p. 37). Evelyn experiences a similarly

narcissistic moment of complete artifice in his

relationship with Tristessa:

For the most fleeting instant, this ghostly and

magnetic woman challenges me in the most overt
and explicit manner. The abyss on which her
eyes open, ah! it is the abyss of myself, of
emptiness, of inward void. I, she, we are
outside history. We are beings without a
history, we are mysteriously twinned by our
synthetic life. (p. 125)

Ironically, of course, Evelyn is precisely not outside

ideology or history since he too is only a reaffirmation

of culture and stereotypes. Like Tristessa's audience,

Evelyn has entered into his own fantasy world, in which he

is a totally artificial ideological construction and not

individual at all. Importantly, Carter's novel shows that

in the process of reducing Leilah to her sexual function,

Evelyn reduces himself, and both become mythic

abstractions. Carter comments in The Sadeian Woman:

The nature of the individual is not resolved

into but is ignored by these archetypes [that
is, Man Woman], since the function of
mythic and
is to diminish the unique 'I' in
the archetype
favour of a collective, sexed being which
cannot, by reason of its very nature, exist as

54 inopening the chapter of

This recalls Marianne
Heroes the ruins outside the
and Villains, who walks among
Professor's barricades but unmolested by the
remains
Outpeople. She, like Evelyn, appears to have no notion of
Otherness, have constructed it in
except as the Professors
order to confirm their own unique identity.
The Character of 'Woman' 253

such because an archetype is only an image that

has got too big for its boots and bears, a
fantasy relation to reality. (p. 6)

(Carter uses the word 'archetype' in a way that shows that

it is not universal, but arises from specific social

conjunctions. ) The Passion shows how such apparent

universals function, but simultaneously exposes them as

cultural constructions.

The Passion therefore dramatises the severe

limitations of both gender stereotypes. Evelyn is trapped

by his own reading of Leilah; and ironically, Evelyn

comments, 'I was lost the moment I saw her' (p. 19). He

thinks of himself as the hunter, stalking his prey in his

fantasy; yet he realises that the binary opposition which

structures their relationship is reversible, and he

becomes her prey: 'I dropped down upon her like, I

suppose, a bird of prey, although my prey, throughout the

pursuit, had played the hunter' (p. 25). Even the

reversibility of the hunter/hunted relationship, however,

is written into the stereotype, so that Evelyn can blame

Leilah for seducing him, in order to maintain the position

of power. It does not, therefore, challenge the status

quo.

The novel is also self-consciously commenting upon

the dangers and reproducing the status

of readers reading

quo, where, by identifying with particular characters,

they may also find themselves reduced to sexual

stereotypes: in their illusion of what they

trapped own
The Character of 'Woman' 254

think they should be, or, as Cixous warns, 'locked up in

the treadmill of reproduction' like a marionette ('The

Character of 'Character, ' p. 387). The narrative in The

Passion, by incorporating pornographic imagery to describe

Evelyn's fantasy, might also be categorised as a

masturbatory fantasy. It, too, announces itself as

artificial: the devices of intertextuality, excessive use

of adjectives and figures, and what Paulina Palmer has

called the 'baroquely ornate passages describing the

erotic "masquerades" Tristessa and Leilah perform,

advertise the fictionality of the text' (Contemporary

Women's Fiction, p. 19). The problem and also the power of

the pornographic elements in The Passion can be located in

a double response to such writing. Does the reader have

an erotic response to the images portrayed? Or, is the

reader aware only of the stereotype as a stereotype.

Carter argues in The Sadeian Woman that 'all art which

contains elements of eroticism [is] writing that can

...
"pull" a reader just as a woman "pulls" a man or a man

"pulls" a woman' (p. 17). The reader of The Passion, as

already discussed, is often written into the position of

the male gaze, a voyeuristic position, by the male

narrator. 55 This single point of view reflects the

55 is both complicated when

This reinforced and
Evelyn's directly, as it
narrative addresses Tristessa
does to do,
at the opening of the novel, and continues
intermittently, Readers may feel that they
throughout.
are sucked into the Evelyn/Tristessa fantasy, or perhaps
that they are being given access to a private
technique might function
correspondence. This narrative
to remind fictionality of the text, or
readers of the
The Character of 'Woman' 255

narcissistic fantasy which structures the narrative.

(Later in the novel, of course, the reader learns that

what at first appears to be a male narrator, narrating his

story in retrospect, may indeed be female, or

hermaphroditic. This obviously undermines the notion of

the male gaze and the problematises the novel's use of so-

called pornographic elements; see Chapter 5 for further

discussion of this issue. ) The novel, then, appears to

exploit the seductive capabilities of pornography, just as

it uses some of the illusion-creating techniques

traditionally associated with the nineteenth-century

'realist' novel (though the use of pornography is much

more dangerous and disturbing). Hence, it might appear

that to the degree that Leilah arouses the reader's erotic

fantasies, she escapes representation (that is, she

appears to be presented, unmediated, as an available

female body). But, as we have seen in the examples of

characters appear to exist beyond the text, the most

which

precisely those which do

powerful representations are

fulfil stereotypes, and hence reinforce the reader's sense

Evelyn is by Leilah because she is

of self. aroused

artificial, and because she conforms to the conventions,

and, similarly, the reader may find the description erotic

for In this way, Carter's text

exactly the same reasons.

is mimicking the that pornographic texts work.

ways

might, ironically, be part of the novel's seductive

which appears to
apparatus. The retrospective narrative,
be dedicated to (indeed, speaks to) a transvestite
(though, by desire, female) lover from the past, resembles
that Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
of The Infernal Desire
The Character of 'Woman' 256

However, when Carter comments upon the seductive

qualities of erotic art to 'pull' a reader, she continues:

'All such literature has the potential to force the reader

to reassess his relation to his own sexuality' (The

Sadeian Woman, p. 17). The pornographic elements in The

Passion could also have this double function: they could

be used both to seduce the reader, but could

simultaneously, and self-consciously, be used to make

him/her aware of the process of seduction, and hence to

announce the stereotype as a stereotype. An important

difference, however, between the analysis of character, an

analysis of pornography, and an analysis of how the codes

structure pornography affect real relationships, is

which

how self-consciousness is signalled. It is possible to

demystify as a cultural construct by exposing it

character

as artificial, but one of the dangers of working with

pornography as a tool, as I showed by the analogy with

Tristessa's films, is that it thrives on artificiality.

To show that pornographic images are artificial

constructions is to reinforce them, just as the

only

ideological structure Hollywood film are not

codes which

brought to by the knowledge that the

consciousness

in This also appears to

characters the film are not real.

be true of the last analysis in this chapter.

For to the artificiality of Leilah's

example, note

getting dressed-up, made-up, and constructing a disguise,

of the illusion of
might appear to suggest a destruction

Woman as sex-object, but, since it is part of a

The Character of 'Woman' 257

pornographic fantasy, it serves only as a recognition and

reiteration of the stereotype. Leilah is shown to be a

purely artificial construction acting out a role which

Evelyn consciously describes as only 'a fiction of the

erotic dream into which the mirror cast me' (p. 30, my

emphasis), but, once again, woman as artificial is part of

the stereotype. The mirror too, and the voyeur are

integral parts of the convention. Annette Kuhn,

commenting upon glamorous Hollywood film stars and

contemporary cosmetic advertising, makes several points

which are particularly appropriate to the image of Woman

which Leilah represents:

A good deal of the groomed beauty of the women

of the glamour portraits comes from the fact
that they are 'made-up', in the immediate sense
that cosmetics have been applied to their bodies
in order to enhance their existing qualities.
But they are also 'made-up' in the sense that
the images, rather than the women, are put
together, constructed, even fabricated or
falsified in the sense that we might say a story
is made up if it is a fiction.... [it] promotes
the ideal woman as being put together, composed
defined by appearance. It is
of surfaces and
here that the tradition in all its
glamour
manifestations may be seen to occupy a place
dangerously close to another tradition of
from myth to fairytale
representation of women,
to high to pornography, in which they are
art
Woman is
stripped of will and autonomy.
dehumanised by being represented as a kind of
a 'living doll': The Sleeping
automaton,
Beauty, Coppelia, L'Histoire d'O, 'She's a real
doll! ' (The Power of the Image, pp. 13-14)

This ways in which Leilah

quotation also suggests

resembles across Carter's work, which are

other characters

the 'living doll, ' the

all linked together by the motif of

Palmer, (quoting Helene Cixous)

puppet, or what Paulina
The Character of 'Woman' 258

has called the 'coded mannequin' (see 'From "Coded

Mannequin" to Bird Woman').

The use of pornographic codes to read a 'real'

relationship--between Evelyn and Leilah--however, posits

two levels of artifice: an acknowledged artifice which

implies a hidden but available material body which is

possessable; and an unacknowledged artifice, which relies

upon the artificial nature of the body at stake in

pornography, which is a product of fantasy. For example,

Evelyn describes Leilah's transformation in the mirror as

an acknowledged artifice, as if she were transforming

herself from something 'natural' into something

'artificial. ' But this very transformation is shown to be

a totally coded process, which is all part of Evelyn's

fantasy. Evelyn explains, 'The more clothed she became,

the more vivid became my memory of her nakedness, ' (p. 30):

nakedness, then, is not a physical nakedness, but a

fantasised and artificial one. Hence, the text shows, but

Evelyn is not made aware (unacknowledged artifice), that

Leilah 'before' Leilah 'after' are equally coded. It

and

also shows that pornography relies upon the illusion of a

distinction between art and nature. The rupture of

is
pornographic codes takes place, and self-consciousness

the difference between these two

signalled, at point of

notions of the body. In other words, the rupture occurs

when the unacknowledged artifice has to be acknowledged.

In The Passion this is signalled by Leilah's pregnancy,

abortion, and subsequent haemorrhage (pp. 34-35), which

The Character of 'Woman' 259

shatters the pornographic illusion of Woman as purely a

sex-object. The available, consumable body, which Leilah

represents to Evelyn, is a flesh and blood body: one

which falls pregnant, and which undergoes a disastrous

abortion. This flesh-and-blood body, however, is not non-

coded, or essential, since in a different stereotype,

Woman as mother, Leilah's pregnancy would serve only as a

confirmation. The codes of pornography, however, have no

place for this new stereotype, and hence the pregnant

Leilah has no place in the world of Evelyn's fantasies:

'As soon as I knew she was carrying my child, any

remaining desire for her vanished. She became only an

embarrassment to me. She became a shocking inconvenience

to me' (p. 32). In this case, therefore, the pornographic

stereotype is shattered because it has become self-

contradictory.

It is in this way that The Passion attempts to

denounce the codes which structure pornography as codes,

and to rupture the process of seduction which it

simultaneously encourages. To do this, however, The

Passion delicate balance between the

must maintain a very

seductive the disturbing qualities of its pornographic

and

elements: the of seduction is

where possibility

continually posited, just as the possibility of a

transcendent is posited, but the

reading of character

the text the seduction from

self-consciousness of prevents

taking place. Carter's use of pornography, therefore, may

function the demythologising process by

as part of
The Character of 'Woman' 260

shocking readers into an awareness of the codes and

conventions which do seduce, and exposing these codes as

false universals. The pornographic elements in this novel

may also make the reader aware of the codes which

construct their own sexuality, and, by denouncing these

codes as codes, open up possibilities for redefinition and

change. For some readers and critics, however, as I have

shown, this demythologising process fails to convince, and

for them The Passion reads as a reactionary, indeed,

dangerous text, where the pornographic elements serve only

to reinforce the status quo. Making the distinction

'between a text which constitutes a serious consideration

of the topic' of pornography and 'one that is an exercise

in pornography' (Paulina Palmer, 'From "Coded Mannequin, "'

p. 189) is clearly problematic; Carter's ambiguous work

does not attempt to resolve this issue. The balance, as I

have said, is a very delicate one, and, as Gina Wisker

concludes, in 'Winged Women and Werewolves, ' 'it is

finally a complex problem of readership' (p. 97).

The Passion, then, implies that sexual difference,

like identity, is a totally coded, cultural construction;

and that there is outside these

no essential womanliness

codes. Therefore, like Denise Riley in 'Am I That Name? '

the and acts 'as if'

novel follows a strategic politics

the stereotype of Woman described an unchangeable reality

(and the novel that the codes and conventions which

shows

of reality); but at
structure sexual difference are a part
The Character of 'Woman' 261

the same time shows how, precisely as a system of

stereotypes, the reality is always changeable. The novel

self-consciously relies upon reading conventions, such as

those which govern pornography, the 'realist' novel, or

classical Hollywood films, and attempts to make these

conventions explicit as conventions, in order to demystify

the false universals which govern sexual politics.

 CHAPTER 5

THE LIBERATION OF THE FEMALE SUBJECT? --I:

'THE MAGIC TOYSHOP, ' 'HEROES AND VILLAINS, ' AND 'THE

PASSION OF NEW EVE'

The alchemists have a saying, 'Tertium non

data': the third is not given. That is, the
transformation from one element to another, from
waste matter into best gold, is a process that
cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious.
No one really knows what effects the change.
And so it is the mind that moves from its
with
prison to a vast plain without any movement at
all. We can only guess at what happened.

Jeanette Wintersonl

1 (1989) (London: Vintage, 1990),

Sexing the Cherry
p. 131.
The Liberation of the Female Subiect? --I 263

Angela Carter's fiction presents many central female

characters. Perhaps the best known, certainly the best

documented, are the heroines of the short stories in The

Bloody Chamber, where Carter rewrites a number of fairy

stories from a female perspective. In a later collection,

Black Venus, she writes the lives of both fictional and

historical heroines focusing on the (until now) silent

women. The title story, for example, reconstructs the

life of Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire's 'Black Venus. '

Clare Hanson neatly sums up this story's focus on Duval:

As a historical figure she is always defined

against Baudelaire and subordinate to him.
Carter attempts to reverse these priorities and
places Jeanne at the centre of her story, as
subject, while Baudelaire becomes Jeanne's
object, viewed by her with affectionate
derision.

Carter has edited two volumes of stories: the first,

also

Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, is a collection of short

stories by women, all of which focus on female characters

do to norms. The second, The

who not conform patriarchal

Virago Book of Fairy Tales, her most recent book,

the 1990, again focuses on female

published at end of

characters. In the introduction, Carter writes:

These stories have only one thing in

centre around a female
common--they all

2 Images of Otherness in
Clare Hanson, 'Each Other:
the Lessing, Jean Rhys and Angela
Short Fiction of Doris
Short Story in English, 10
Carter, ' in Journal of the
(Spring 1988), 67-82 (p. 78). Linda Hutcheon, in The
Politics (London: Routledge, 1989),
of Postmodernism
145, 'The to whom history denied a voice
p. writes, woman
is the 'Black Venus'--as she was the
subject of Carter's
object of Baudelaire's 'Black Venus' poems.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 264
--I

protagonist; be she clever, or brave, or good,

or silly, or cruel, or sinister, or awesomely
unfortunate, she is centre stage, as large as
life--sometimes larger. (The Virago Book of
...
Fairy Tales, p. xiii)

Then there are, of course, the heroines of her novels,

some of whom I will discuss in detail in this chapter. A

question which this particular focus in Carter's work

raises, and which is obviously of prime importance to a

study of her work, is what constitutes a liberated female

subject? Does such a thing exist to be portrayed? or how

can it be constructed?

Many of Angela Carter's heroines are rebellious girls

or women who challenge patriarchal notions of what Woman

'should be'; they are women '"who know about life"'

(Wayward 3 Several
Girls and Wicked Women, p. xii). of

these female characters have been labelled by critics as

New Eve figures. This title seems appropriate since

Carter's work is riddled with references to Christian

mythology as she attempts to emphasize and at the same

time challenge, by rewriting, the particular power of the

Eve myth which patriarchal society uses to construct

Woman. 4 Angela Carter's New Eves fall (some several

all

3 is misquoting the final line of Luo Shu's

Carter
story, 'Aunt Liu, ' 'I believe she is living still and with
for life, '
all my heart I wish her well, she understands
pp. 328-34 (p. 334).

4
The power the Eve to shape contemporary
of myth
culture is in the of many major feminist
a concern work
for Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex,
writers, example,
translated by H. M. Parshley (1949) (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), 112-13 and p. 173; and Kate Millett's
pp.
Sexual Politics (1969) (London: Virago, 1977), p. 52.
John A. Philips, in Eve: The History of an Idea (San
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 265
--I

times) but their Falls often appear to lead to better

existences, outside the patriarchal confines of

'Paradise. ' Instead of being expelled from their Fathers'

houses, these Eves liberate themselves.

Carter must, of course, provide these Eves God

with
figures, representatives of patriarchy to struggle with

and escape from. These characters take the form of

particular kinds of villain--mad doctor/scientist/puppet

master--for example, Uncle Philip in The Magic Toyshop,

Donally in Heroes and Villains, Dr Hoffman and the

Minister in The Infernal Desire MachinPG of nnntnr

Hoffman, Zero in The Passion, the Shaman in Nights at the

Circus. In the interview with John Raffenden, Carter

claims:

My villains are usually mad scientists, but I

really don't know why, since I've got nothing
against science as such. The toy-maker, the
puppet master, is the ideal villain... and the
vicar in Heroes and Villains.

Her work does not, of course, comment on science 'as

such, ' but the popular images of science. Each attempt by

women to escape from these villains can be interpreted as

Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), writes that the myth of

Eve

remains deeply imbedded both malein and female

ideas about the nature and destiny of women, and
the it has engendered are embodied in
attitudes
the psychology, laws, religious life, and social
structures of the Western world--not to mention
the intimate human activities. Eve is
most of
very much alive and every member of Western
society is affected by her story. (p. 172)

5 John Haffenden, in Interview (London:

Novelists
Methuen, 1985), p. 95.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 266

an attempt to flee from patriarchal 'paradise'; however,

their escapes are seldom simply successful or celebratory

experiences. What appears to be important, however, is

the belief in the possibility of escape, and the process

of liberation itself. This process is repeated over and

over throughout all of Carter's fiction; and each attempt

at liberation from a set of pre-established codes is

necessarily complemented by the exposure and subversion of

the patriarchal institutions the codes uphold.

Eve in The Passion is, of course, the most obvious

example of a New Eve figure, though several of Carter's

other heroines also fit the bill. In the interview with

John Haffenden, for example, Carter points to Melanie in

The Magic Toyshop, saying that Melanie and Finn, at the

end of the novel, are 'escaping like Adam and Eve at the

end of Paradise Lost.... two people alone, about to depart

from a garden' (Novelists in Interview, p. 80). It is

important to note that Carter does not refer to rewriting

the book of Genesis, but, rather, to source material which

is that is, to is already a

already a displacement, what

rewriting, 'justification of the ways of God to

or a

man. '6 Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, as Carter makes

clear in the interview, is a significant literary

same

6 introduction to John Milton's

Merritt Y. Hughes's
Paradise Lost (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. xviii.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 267

source for her work.? Carter explains her attempt to

portray her own interpretation of the 'Fortunate Fall':

I got it wrong, of course, because the theory of

the Fortunate Fall has it that it was fortunate
because it incurre, d the Crucifixion, an idea
which I think only an unpleasant mind could have
dreamt up. I took the Fortunate Fall as meaning
that it was a good thing to get out of that
place. (Novelists in Interview, p. 80)8

The toyshop represents 'a secularized Eden' (Novelists in

Interview, p. 80) and Uncle Philip represents God the

Father, an oppressive, misogynist ruler. Philip Flower

sits at the table in 'patriarchal majesty, ' drinking from

'his own, special, pint-size mug which had the word

"Father" executed on it in rosebuds' (p. 73); '"He can't

abide a woman in trousers"' (p. 62), and "'He likes, you

know, silent women"' (p. 63). At the end of the novel,

Philip home to find his wife and Francie in

when returns

an incestuous embrace--'his wife in her brother's arms'

(p. 196)--he sets the whole building on fire. Melanie and

Finn from Uncle Philip's rage and from the toyshop

escape

in they have been imprisoned (Melanie, at this

which

is trousers). The novel, however, has very

point, wearing

7 interview Carter also claims, 'If

In the Haffenden
fairy tales are the fiction of the poor, then perhaps
Paradise Lost is the folklore of the educated' (p. 85).

8 Carter, 'Myths and the

In an interview with
1 (November 1985), 28-29, Anne
Erotic, ' in Women's Review,
Smith, quoting Carter, writes:

in her academic life, she

As a medievalist
herself 'spending a lot of time
naturally found
thinking the Fall', and 'obviously' she
about
'I they'd done wrong...
says, couldn't see what
transgression? '
How come it's always sexual
(p. 28)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 268
--I

carefully prepared for, and undercut in advance, this

symbolic liberatory flight by showing that Melanie and

Finn's relationship is limited by the same patriarchal

codes which governed life with Uncle Philip. In 'From

"Coded Mannequin" to Bird Woman, ' Paulina Palmer points

out 'Carter's recognition of the part played by the family

in reproducing structures of male dominance and female

subordination' in The Magic Toyshop, and she very usefully

documents how the novel makes it clear that Finn and

Melanie trapped. 9 describes

are similarly Palmer two

different scenes, the first when Finn and Melanie wake in

bed together (though they are not necessarily the 'lovers'

that Palmer claims: Finn is described in terms of a

frightened boy, and Melanie the adult who comforts him

after he has chopped up and buried Uncle Philip's swan

puppet); the second scene describes breakfast without

Uncle Philip:

While in bed with her lover Finn, with her

little sister Victoria playing in the room, she
has a sudden disquieting sense that she and Finn
'might have been married for years and Victoria
their baby' [p. 177]. Involuntarily, she finds
herself slotted into the roles of wife and
mother. In a similar manner Finn, occupying the
place usually taken by Uncle Philip at the
breakfast table, is greeted by Victoria as
'Daddy' [p. 183]. In rebelling against his
uncle's authority, he discovers himself usurping
his position. ('From "Coded Mannequin, "'
pp. 183-84)

9 "Coded Mannequin" to Bird

Paulina Palmer, 'From
Woman: Angela Carter's Magic Flight, ' in Women Reading
Women's Writing, edited by Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester,
1987), pp. 179-205 (p. 182). Palmer discusses Heroes and
Villains and The Passion of New Eve in similar terms.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 269
--I

While Finn assumes patriarchal authority, then, Melanie

can only see herself reflected in his terms: 'She in

sat

Finn's face; there she was, mirrored twice' (p. 193); both

Melanie and Finn, it is suggested, will be to the

subject

very conventions from which they appear to have 10

escaped.

The eye trope recurs throughout Carter's fiction, and

nearly all of the heroines of her novels at some point see

themselves reflected in their male lover/lover-to-be's

eyes; that is, they see themselves reflected in

patriarchal terms, as objects. In The Passion, for

example, Eve, like Marianne, sees herself reflected twice

in her lover, Tristessa's, eyes, and the reflection gives

her back the image of a stereotypical consumable woman:

Eve sees 'the soft, bruisable flesh of my innocent face an

open invitation to the marauder just as the ripe peach

invites teeth' (p. 125). Similarly, at the end of Nights

at the Circus, when Fevvers rediscovers Walser, he appears

10 in 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's

Elaine Jordan,
Speculative Fictions, ' Plotting Change: Contemporary
Women's Fiction, edited by Linda Anderson (London: Edward
Arnold, 1990) takes issue with Robert Clark's article,
'Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' in Women's Studies--An
Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, No. 2 (1987), 147-161. In
the process, she disagrees totally with my, and Palmer's,
reading of the ending of The Magic Toyshop:

In the end Melanie and Finn escape to confront a

future which is open, unwritten, potentially
quite different. It is the opposite of 'The
Loves Purple', from Fireworks (1974,
of Lady
1987), the puppet woman destroys the
where
puppet master only to re-enact his scenario
because she knows and can construct no other.
The Magic Toyshop has to do with overcoming the
Oedipal incentives which make 'the
and cultural
threat enticing [Clark,
of rape... continually
p. 150]. ' (p. 29)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 270
--I

to see her in his terms and not in hers: Fevvers panicked

because she 'felt herself trapped forever in the

reflection in Walser's eyes, ' when 'instead Fevvers,

of

two 11
she saw perfect miniatures of a dream' (p. 290),

The Eve figures can often be used to generate a

Utopian or affirmative reading of Carter's fiction, since

they represent the many opportunities to start afresh

which continually shape and motivate her picaresque

narratives. The rest of this chapter will consider the

Eve figures in Heroes and Villains and The Passion of New

Eve. It will also chart the development of Eve figures in

Carter's work, summarising the varying critical responses

which they have provoked, and showing how Carter's earlier

fiction prepares the way for the celebratory heroine,

Fevvers, in Nights at the Circus. The complexity with

which the figure of Fevvers is handled will be discussed

in detail in the next and concluding chapter.

II

Heroes and Villains appears to be another version of

The Fortunate Fall, Marianne escapes from her

where

father's village, and goes to

oppressively patriarchal

live the However, Marianne's 'escape, '

with Barbarians.

like that of Melanie and Finn in The Magic Toyshop, may

11 is frequently used
Carter has taken a trope which
in Rennaisance poetry to represent fulfilled and mutual
(patriarchal) love, turned it into an image of
and
objectification and entrapment.
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ect? 271
--I

well be a shift from one false Paradise to another. The

Professor's camp in Heroes and Villains is described

overtly and ironically as another of Carter's secularized

Edens, this time surrounded by barbed wire (p. 3). Like a

fairy-tale princess, Marianne lives 'in a white tower made

of steel and concrete' (p. 1), as if waiting for a prince

to rescue her. Marianne's 'Prince Charming, ' takes the

form of Jewel, a Barbarian, wounded and hiding in a shed,

after a raid. It is unclear who rescues whom, since at

first Marianne goes to Jewel's aid, but then, although

'she had wanted to rescue him [she] found she was

accepting his offer to rescue her' (p. 18). Once outside

the vicinity of the Professorial village Marianne finds

herself in a new garden, this time accompanied by an Adam

figure: the forest

seemed real breath

the of a wholly new and
vegetable world, a world as unknown and
to Marianne as the depths of the sea;
mysterious
the body the man who slept, it would
or of young
seem, sweetly, in her lap. (p. 22)

Two critics, David Punter and Brooks Landon, agree

that Marianne's to liberate herself, by leaving

attempt

the Professors to join the Barbarians, is a move which

little Punter points out that life

signifies change.

among the Barbarians is just restrictive as life among

as

the Professors, 12 interprets Marianne's first

and Landon

bid 'discovers that life

for freedom as abortive since she

12 Literature of Terror: A
David Punter, The
History from 1765 to the Present Da
of Gothic Fictions
(London: Longman, 1980), p. 398.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 272
--I

among the Barbarians, while Hobbesian (that is, "nasty,

brutish, and short"), is not significantly less boring

than life among the Professors'13.

Just as Marianne was trapped in her tower in the

Professorial village, so, when she flees to the

Barbarians, she sees the threat of being trapped by Jewel.

Being trapped is described as another Fall, and seen in

terms of another permutation of the eye trope: 'Jewel

opened his eyes and stared at her. Trapped in his regard

so closely and suddenly, she briefly experienced a

sensation of falling' (p. 23). Jewel explains to Marianne

that the Barbarian tribe is organised by 'a patriarchal

system' (p. 90), and both Jewel, who becomes her husband,

and Donally, who 'perversely reminded her of her father'

(p. 53), attempt to reduce her to an object--attempts which

include rape and forced marriage. Like a fairy tale

princess, Marianne exchanges one repressive patriarchal

community, where attempts were made to define her in terms

of her father and the codes of the Professorial community,

for another, where attempts are made to define her in

terms of a surrogate father and husband. Rory P. B.

Turner very neatly describes this situation, where 'as

objects, valuable objects, women's lives tend to transpire

13 'Eve the End of the World:

Brooks Landon, at
Sexuality in Novels by
and the Reversal of Expectations
Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, Thomas Berger, ' in Erotic
and
Universe: Sexuality Literature, edited by
and Fantastic
Donald Palumbo (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986),
pp-61-74 (pp. 67-68).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 273

as movements from one conditional role in relation to men

to another, from daughter to wife and mistress. '14

One of the most powerful themes in Heroes and

Villains, however, describes Marianne's struggles to

resist stereotypical roles. During her childhood Marianne

avoids conventional roles by refusing to conform; she

resists being easily categorised in terms of her father

and she misbehaves in ways which are childish but

significant: 'Marianne tripped up the son of the

Professor of Mathematics and left him sprawling and

yowling in the dust, which was not in the rules' (p. 3).

Instead, she mimics a male role by symbolically cutting

off all of her hair 'so she looked like a demented boy'

(p. 15). Once she has escaped from the Professors to the

Barbarians, she refuses to become another of Donally's

creatures, or to be defined in terms of Jewel.

It is this rebellion against definition that critics

celebrate as a feminist victory. Lorna Sage suggests that

Marianne a 'new order, ' and 'possibly the new

represents

14 P. B. Turner in 'Subjects and Symbols:

Rory
in Nights at the Circus, ' in
Transformations of Identity
Folklore Forum, 20, Nos. 1/2 (1987), 39-60 (p. 42). Paulina
Palmer's this in her comments on the
also makes point
family in 'From "Coded Mannequin, ' p. 182. See also the
Jack Zipes from Andrea Dworkin's Woman
epigraph uses
Art Subversion (New
Hating, in Fairy Tales and the of
describes the
York: Methuen, 1988), p. 170, which
different effects of fairy tales on boys and girls.
Zipes's 192, an extensive list of
footnote 1, p. contains
feminist consider that fairy tales reflect
articles which
patriarchal concerns.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 274
--I

order will be a matriarchy. '15 David Punter identifies

Marianne as a 'New Woman' figure (to be compared, he

suggests, with similar female figures in the work of

Wilkie Collins Bram Stoker), 16 he describes

and and the

novel as 'a multivalent parody: of class relations, of

relations between the sexes, of the battle between

rational control and desire' (The Literature of Terror,

p. 397). This battle, Punter argues, is also a conflict

within Marianne herself, and one which, she gradually

realises, grants her a position of power among the

Barbarians:

They [the Barbarians] may play at being violent

but Marianne grows, precisely through her female
experiences, through her first-hand knowledge of
repression, into a force far more effective than
they, more pragmatic and less bound by ritual
and superstition. In the end, both male-
dominated worlds look like different aspects of
the same nursery.

There are, obviously, no heroes and no villains;

of silly games which men play. (The
only a set
Literature of Terror, p. 398)

Marianne, Punter her power because of her

argues, realises

knowledge of repression (as a woman in patriarchal

the he maintains, she is

society). By the end of novel,

liberated from both of the male-dominated worlds, which

this have to shape and rule her.

until point attempted

15 Biography, 14,
Lorna Sage, Dictionary of Literary
'British Novelists Since 1960' (Detroit, Michigan:
Bruccoli Clark, 1983), pp. 205-12 (p. 208).

16
David Punter, The Literature of Terror, pp. 397-
to Marian in
98, and p. 401, footnote 11. He is referring
(1860) and Lucy in
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 275
--I

She is liberated because she is aware of the of

pitfalls

both of these worlds, which rely on playing out 'silly

[war] for 17
games' self-definition.

Brooks Landon isolates a phrase from Heroes and

Villains which identifies Marianne as an Eve figure, and

uses it to name his article 'Eve at the End of the World'

(Heroes and Villains, p. 124). Picking up on Punter's

location of Marianne 'in the gothic tradition of the "New

Woman, "' Landon produces an even more optimistic argument

which celebrates 'Marianne's radical departure from the

female stereotype associated with the Edenic myth' (p. 69

and p. 70 respectively). He describes the novel in terms

of a reconstruction of this myth, and argues that it

attempts to remythologise the image of the woman in the

garden. Finally, Landon claims, enthusiastically, that

Marianne becomes a completely independent, Utopian New

Woman, freed from patriarchal codes:

In Carter's post-lapsarian garden Marianne

...
tempts nor can be tempted, is neither
neither
victim nor victimizer. As a new Eve she is
reflective, self-sufficient, unfearing; she
needs no Adam, and her actions and attitude
drain Donally's familiar icon [the snake] of all
power. (pp. 69-70)

And, 'Carter's Marianne does become "Eve at the end of the

" but Eve to mythology has

world, an whom patriarchal

nothing to say' ('Eve at the End of the World, ' p. 70).

17
I have discussed the Barbarians' and Professors'
mutual dependency and its importance in creating a sense
Chapter 3.
of identity in the last section of
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 276
--I

Marianne appears to these critics to represent the

possibility of positive change. She embodies the freedom

associated with the rebel, the figure outside convention,

and as a rebel, she personifies what Paulina Palmer has

identified as 'the representation of femininity as a

problematic, disruptive presence within the phallocratic

social order. '18 Landon describes her disruptive

function, explaining that 'Although she does not actually

change the tribal structure, her arrival obliquely leads

to Donally's expulsion and somehow plunges the cynical

Jewel into ever more fatalistic depression' which

eventually leads to his death. Landon also describes the

threat Marianne poses to the status quo:

On marrying Jewel, Marianne becomes at once a

member of the tribe and the element of
unpredictability its rituals and roles cannot
assimilate. That she can both desire and
despise Jewel threatens him; that she is
intelligent, unsuperstitious, and uncorruptible
threatens Donally, the maniacal, renegade
Professor who had ordered her rape and her
('Eve at the End of the World, ' p. 68)
marriage.

As I have already argued, however, in Chapter 3, the role

of rebel is already stereotyped, and already written.

Once the from Marianne appears to have

again, codes which

escaped in since Eden and its opposite

are already place,

are mutually dependent: like the Professors and the

Barbarians, Villains, is constructed in

Heroes and each

18 Contemporary Women's Fiction:

Paulina Palmer,
Narrative Practice Feminist Theory (Jackson:
and
University 1989), p. 75. Palmer is
Press of Mississippi,
describing feature claims is common to all of
a which she
Carter's work, and elaborates the argument with a
discussion of The Magic Toyshop.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 277
--I

relation to the other. There is no place outside

convention, only a necessary belief in 19

such a place.

Marianne also represents, as Punter suggests, a

freedom associated with knowledge: she is conscious of

her own position and of the games of role playing in which

she is, however unwillingly, forced to participate. She

may be forced to act in Donally's script, but she retains

a rational distance. For example at her wedding ceremony

to Jewel she finds herself obliged 'to impersonate the

sign of a memory of a bride' (p. 72), she does not become

the role assigned to her. Because of her conscious

knowledge of the roles assigned her Marianne is able to

struggle against becoming the stereotype 'object' which

they portray.

She appears, for example, to avoid definition in

terms of father or husband by remaining detached from them

both. Even when Jewel rapes her, she retains her autonomy

by remaining as uninvolved as possible, and angry:

She did not make a single sound for her only

strength was her impassivity and she never
her eyes She stared at him
closed cold ...
relentlessly; if he had kissed her, would
55) 28he
have bitten out his tongue. (p.

19 for change, glimpsed this in

These possibilities
novel's experimentation with the disruptive notions of
unpredictability and the capacity to resist assimilation
(even though these are undermined in the novel),
qualities
in Carter's later fiction. They
are developed more fully
of Fevvers in
are especially important to the construction
Nights at the Circus.
20 on the rapes of both
See also Palmer's comments
Marianne in Heroes Melanie in The Magic
and Villains and
Toyshop in 'From "Coded Mannequin"':
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 278

Marianne's detachment is signalled by the comparison she

draws between Jewel raping her and a Barbarian stabbing

and killing her brother, to which she acted as audience.

By drawing the connection between the rape and the

stabbing the novel stresses the violence of this sexual

act. The two events are linked again when Marianne later

recognises Jewel as her brother's killer. She felt, we

are told,

only an angry disquiet, as if he had broken into

her most private place and stolen her most
ambiguously cherished possession. Her memory
was no longer her own; he shared it. She had
never invited him there. (p. 80)

The memory which Jewel violates is not a fond memory of a

loved brother, but of his killer: 'She recalled with

visionary clarity the face of the murdering boy with his

necklaces, rings and knife, although the memory of her

brother's face was totally blurred' (p. 10). Interest-

ingly, this of her mental space appears far more

violation

disturbing to Marianne than her physical rape. During the

latter, detached, but by

she remains rationally

her Jewel has in some way taken

penetrating mental space,

is the mark of her

possession of her rational self, which

difference from the Barbarians.

Melanie Marianne are portrayed as courageous

and
individuals. They respond to
and resourceful
of privacy' [Heroes an
the 'terrible violation
the sexual encounters to
Villains, p. 90] which
involve, not with tears
which they are subjected
but with anger and
or masochistic pleasure
indignation. (p. 188)
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ject? 279
--I

The Barbarians might be interpreted as inhabiting a

'through-the-looking-glass' world, where gender

stereotypes are reversed. In a profile of Carter, Lorna

Sage comments :

Probably the most striking consequence of

accelerating the dissolution of traditional
mores is that sex-roles come out reversed.
Beautiful boys, called things like Jewel and
Precious ('The Barbarians used whatever
forenames they found lying about, as long as
they glittered and shone and attracted them'),
are desc ibed caressingly and coolly as sexual
1
objects.

It is the Barbarian men, it seems, who are specimens to be

admired and exhibited. Jewel's object status, as Sage

points out, is first signalled by his name: 'He was a

curiously shaped, attractive stone; he was an object which

drew her' (p. 82). And Marianne describes him as a male

version of a female stereotype, 'like a phallic and

diabolic version of female beauties of former periods'

(p. 137). In his role as object, then, Jewel is

continually described, or describes himself, in terms of

the eye trope (see also pp. 122,124,137,147). He can

only see himself as he is reflected in other people, and,

indeed, as he reflects himself in language:

'Who do you see me? ' she asked him

you see when

21 'The Savage Sideshow, ' in New Review,

Lorna Sage,
39/40 (1977), 51-57 (p. 52). In the later interview
section of this article, Carter is quoted as saying:

One of the things I was doing then unconsciously

[in Heroes and am now doing
and Villains]
consciously is describing men as objects of
desire. I think a lot of the ambivalence of
I is because I do this. (p. 55)
response get
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 280
--I

'The map of a country in which I only exist by

virtue of the extravagance of my own metaphors'
(p. 120).

Elaine Jordan thinks that 'Marianne incarnates Carter's

will as a storyteller to "do it back, " to represent a man

as the object of a woman's desire' ('Enthralment, ' p. 30).

The oppressive subject/object binary opposition is

continually challenged across Carter's fiction, often by

placing a man in the object position so that he might

experience the role of the other. For example, half way

through Love, after Annabel has a heart tattooed on Lee's

chest, he becomes her object:

He acknowledged that she was far cleverer than

he and began to fear her a little for he could
not alter her at all, although she could change
him in any way she pleased.

And now Annabel had docketeý2him securely

amongst her things. (p. 71)

Similarly, Joseph, in Several Perceptions, finds himself

objectified, this time by his reflection in his

psychiatrist's (an authority figure's) glasses, 'His own

face repeated twice was all the message he received'

(p. 67)--another of the eye motif. In The Passion,

version

when Evelyn first arrives in the matriarchal world of

Beulah, he finds conventional codes inverted, and admits,

'I before how degrading it is to be the

never realised

(p. 65). This technique is exploited to

object of pity'

the full in Nights at the Circus where Fevvers struggles

22
Lee realises his status when he 'could no
object
longer that he had her [Annabel]' (p. 70);
pretend rescued
as we have already noted, the same undecidability as to
rescuer and rescued occurs in Heroes and Villains.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 281
--I

to remain both object and subject, but the tables are

turned on Walser, who is turned into an object. In her

interview with John Haffenden, Carter claims:

Yes, he [Walser] does become an object, and it's

amazing how many people find it offensive when
you do that to a chap. What happens to him is
exactly what happens to another, though a much
nastier person who runs away with a music-hall
artiste and is forced to personate a rooster--do
you remember? --in The Blue Angel. But nobody
forces Jack Walser to behave as a human chicken
it's life. (pp. 89-90)
...

Heroes and Villains, however, also shows that

although Marianne appears to escape convention, she cannot

do so. The 'through-the-looking-glass' world of the

Barbarians appears to offer an alternative mode of being

to Marianne, but finally both the Professors' and

Barbarians' worlds are shown to be only reflections of

each other with no alternative world outside convention.

Marianne's father commented to her early in the novel:

'"I know rather not live here but there is nowhere

you'd

else to go and chaos is the opposite pole of boredom"'

(P. 11).

In both worlds Marianne can be interpreted as an

object of Her father, for instance, had planned

exchange.

to her to her race (pp. 10-11), and Jewel

marry another of

her. When Donally is

and Donally struggle for control of

from the Barbarians he entreats Marianne to go

expelled

him. Marianne has to choose between leaving

along with

Jewel: 'Jewel watched her

with Donally or staying with

between his fingers. She between the beams of

was caught

their (p. 132). When she does succumb

eyes and vacillated'
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 282
--I

to her relationship with Jewel becomes

she momentarily a

stereotypical object, 'She hung round his neck, herself

another necklace' (p. 121). Marianne is shown to be

dependent upon Jewel, just as the Professors dependent

are

upon the Barbarians, as the subject is to the object, for

her sense of identity. Landon is mistaken, then, to claim

that Marianne as Eve needs no Adam. Apart from the fact

that without an Adam, the very notion of Eve as a social

stereotype would cease to exist, when Jewel leaves her at

the end of the novel Marianne loses her sense of

detachment and her sense of reason:

When she could see him no more, she was

surprised to find herself dislocated from and
unfamiliar with her own body. Her hands and
feet seemed strange extensions which hardly
belonged to her; her eyes amorphous jellies.
And she was not able to think. (pp. 148-49)

Throughout most of the novel, however, Marianne

refuses to see herself as an object by retaining her

'reason' and rejecting both Jewel or Donally's attempts to

define her:

Though the rest of the tribe had long since

abandoned this pursuit, the Doctor continued to
watch her. The cracked mirrors of his dark
glasses revealed all manner of potentialities
for Marianne, modes of being to which she might
aspire just as soon as she threw away her reason
as of no further use to her. (p. 107)

Once aware her however, Marianne is

of pregnancy,

disturbed by the realization that

in
some way, related to
she and her Jewel were,
for
one another [and] she was filled with pain
her idea her might, in fact, be
of own autonomy
not the truth but a passionately held
conviction. (p. 132)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 283
--I

(Note that the pronoun 'her' before Jewel still places him

in the object position. ) She then,

realizes, that she is

not completely detached from Jewel, and therefore not

outside of convention, as she had imagined. The

convention is, however, that conventions be

should not

acknowledged as conventions. If she were to recognize her

dependency upon Jewel, if she were to accept that 'he was

necessary to her, ' Marianne realises, she would then be

entering into unknown, and potentially liberatory

territory, because 'that constituted a wholly other

situation which raised a constellation of miserable

possibilities each one indicating that, willy, nilly, she

would be changed' (p. 134). But Marianne is not a

revolutionary; she remains firmly rooted in the known.

She resolves to retain her apparent distance, because she

understands that even if there is no place outside

convention, she can still function as if there were such a

place, since 'might not such a conviction serve her as

well as a proven certainty? ' (p. 132). Ironically, then,

it is her awareness of the child she is to give birth to

which promotes Marianne's retreat into convention. Rather

than functioning as a symbol of regeneration or rebirth,

the forthcoming child signifies the very opposite, and

only reinforces the status quo.

The ending of Heroes and Villains, like the endings

of all Carter's novels, is open and ambiguous. I am

tempted to accept Carter's own description of Heroes and

Villains as a 'dystopian' novel (Novelists in Interview,

The Liberation of the Female Subject? 284
--I

p. 95), and claim that any celebratory elements in this

denouement are balanced, or even eclipsed, by an expose of

the repetition of history and the inescapability of

convention. Marianne, for example, the novel appears to

insist, is doomed to duplicate Donally's role. She

appears fated to repeat the tyrannical leadership of a

Professor among the Barbarians, and therefore to repeat

the same codes and the same means of repression,

regardless of her gender. She is obviously capable of

using her 'first hand knowledge of repression' as Punter

argues, but this appears only to fuel her rising ambition,

thus cancelling out the possibilities for change suggested

throughout the novel. Is Marianne a New Eve, or is she

simply, as Donally suggests at their very first meeting,

when he uncovers 'a grinning medieval skeleton who carried

a stone banner engraved with the motto: AS I AM, SO YE

23 The
SHALL BE' (p. 63), a replica of himself? reference

to death obviously cannot be ignored; it appears to

suggest the inevitability of the course of Marianne's

life, in Donally's footsteps. It may also be meant to

the the life she will choose for

characterise nature of

herself; she regards life amongst the ever more

discipline- and ritual-obsessed Professors as a sort of

23 in her short story

Carter uses this phrase again
'The Quilt Maker, ' in Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction
by Jeanette Winterson (London:
with a Twist, edited
Pandora, 1986), pp. 117-38:

Oh, the with which Middle Ages the

salty realism
with the motto:
put skeletons on gravestones,
'As I am now, be! ' (p. 123)
so ye will
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 285
--I

death and compares their camp to a 'grave' (p. 15). From

their very first meeting Donally's and Marianne's

similarities are stressed: for example, when Marianne

asks him why he joined the Barbarians, he answers as she

might have done if posed the same question: '"I was

bored, " said Donally. "I was ambitious. I wanted to see

the world"' (p. 62). Marianne, however, keeps her distance

and her difference, and when 'Donally tries to play the

Devil to Marianne's Eve' ('Eve at the End of the World, '

p. 69), and tempts her with the promise of power (by

calling upon Swift), she attempts to remain detached by

refusing to ally her ambition with his:

'Domiciled as you are among the Yahoos, you

might as well be Queen of the midden. Don't you
know the meaning of the word "ambition"? '

She shook her head impatiently. (p. 61)

Near the end of the novel, however, immediately after

Donally's expulsion from the Barbarian tribe--indeed, as

soon as he is out of sight--Marianne finds herself, willy

nilly, usurping his place. Like Lady Purple in Carter's

short story, who usurps power from the puppet master,

sucks the air from his lungs and drinks his blood, and

liberates herself only to make 'her way like a homing

pigeon, out of logical necessity, to the single

brothel, '24 Marianne back to what she knows

so retreats

24'The Loves in Fireworks, p. 38. '

of Lady Purple,
Similarly, Alice, in Emma Tennant's novel Alice Fell
(1980) (London: Picador, 1982), struggles not to become
an automaton, and not to conform to the wills of the
people her. At the end of the novel, she is
around
brought back from London by her father to marry her
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 286
--I

best. This is in contrast, for example, to the in

girl
'The Tiger's Bride' (in The Bloody Chamber collection) who

acknowledges her own female desires, breaks the

with past,

and sends her 'clockwork twin' (p. 60) back to her father

to act her part (p. 65). Marianne recognises her

predicament instantly 'when she realized she had begun to

think in such circuitous slogans as Donally might paint on

his wall' (p. 132). She appears doomed not only to repeat

the 'traditions' Donally invented but also to repeat his

linguistic conventions. Soon afterwards, during an

interaction with Jewel's brothers, Marianne 'felt the

beginnings of a sense of power' (p. 144). Finally, coming

round from a faint caused by news of Jewel's death, and

informed that the Bradley brothers intend to leave her

behind, she calls on the ritual power of fear, which

Donally has explained to her in detail (p. 63) in order to

take control:

'Oh, no, ' she said. 'They won't get rid of me

as easily as that. I shall stay here and
frighten them so much they'll do every single
thing I say. '

'What, will you be queen? ' [asks Donally's son]

'I'll be the tiger lady and rule them with a rod

of iron' (p. 150)

childhood friend William. 'The marionettes of

childhood.... danced Alice's future, over cobbles always
wet from rain in that bad summer' (p. 122), however, and
the novel suggests the inevitability of Alice return to
her life of prostitution in London, where she 'belongs'
(p. 118). Alice fell as a child, and it appears therefore
that she will keep on falling, again and again.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 287
--I

In effect, she gives in to temptation and bites deep into

the apple (ambition) which Donally, as Satan, had offered

25
her.

Far from proposing change, then, this ending appears

to exhibit only a reaffirmation of patriarchal structures.

Marianne intends to carry on Donally's practices, and it

is with 'a rod of iron, ' a very conspicuous phallic

symbol, which Marianne intends to rule. Marianne's

preference for phallic symbols is indicated earlier in the

novel when she and Jewel visit the sea and come across a

submerged town. Jewel expects her to identify with the

grotesque figure of 'a luxuriously endowed woman' (p. 138),

but Marianne is immediately drawn to a second building,

the lighthouse, 'a white tower [which] glistened like a

luminous finger pointing to heaven' (p. 139). The

lighthouse represents Marianne's patriarchal background

amongst the professors, as the narrative makes clear:

To Marianne, it looked the twin of the white

tower in which she had been born and she was
much moved for, though neither tower any
very
longer light, both still served to
cast a useful
inform of surrounding dangers. Thus
warn and
this tower glimpsed in darkness symbolized and
clarified her resolution; abhor shipwreck, said
the lighthouse, go in fear of unreason. Use
the lighthouse. She fell in
your wits, said

25 Marianne this image to describe Jewel when

uses
'in his eyes she thought she saw the birth of ambition':
"'If I took your shirt, I think I
she says to him, off
would see that Adam had accepted the tattooed apple at
last"' (p. 146). It is interesting to note that Jewel's
tattoo depicts the apple to Adam, not Satan
Eve offering
it to Eve. The fall of woman has already taken
offering
it is is the potentially disruptive
place, and woman who
presence.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 288
--I

love with the integrity of the lighthouse.

(p. 139)

Marianne will not strive for the unknown and will not

bring about change, but will live by known patriarchal

rituals and traditions of the past.

In this novel, then, Carter exposes and demystifies

the feminist argument for women's equality which depends

upon women mimicking men. Marianne, as we have seen, does

not become an object, but in her attempt to become a

female subject she manages only to switch gender roles and

conform to patriarchal codes as if she were a man (which

her status and education as a Professor's daughter, or

ruling class, enables her to do). Carter's novel

describes this as a reactionary stance which does not

provoke fundamental changes since it does not challenge

but only conforms to convention.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that Marianne's

reactionary victory at the end of the novel should provoke

The depiction of a woman in

such celebratory responses.

power, who, the novel suggests, appears to offer no

challenge to convention, but who in fact only strengthens

the hierarchical which structure her

oppressive and codes

society (strengthens them more, perhaps, since she appears

to them by the fact of being female), seems

challenge very

conclusion in
to be a very comfortable and non-threatening

patriarchal terms.

Annabel, in Love, is also portrayed as a woman in

power, and she this power by an 'almost sinister

gains
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 289
--I

feat of male impersonation. '26 Halfway through the novel

Annabel switches roles with Lee, not only assuming power

in their relationship and reducing him to but
an object,

also by taking over his character, as if sucking the life

out of him: 'She counterfeited, ' for example, 'the only

spontaneous smile he had and took it away from him,

leaving him no benign expressions left for himself'

(p. 78). There are several allusions to Annabel's vampiric

capacities, but, ironically, it is Lee who is portrayed as

having no shadow (p. 74) Where Marianne's rise to power

.
in Heroes and Villains is described in terms of

rationality, Annabel's appears to be the product of

unreason, of madness, which finally leads to her suicide.

In the end, however, as Marianne's father warned, '"chaos

is the opposite pole of boredom"' (Heroes and Villains,

p. 11), and both of their positions are shown to be part of

the same construct. Marianne and Annabel become two of

Carter's notorious puppet figures ('coded mannequins')

with convention pulling their strings: Marianne is

destined to her Professorial role, and Annabel is

act out

literally described as 'no longer vulnerable flesh and

blood, she was altered to inflexible material' (Love,

P. 104).

26 to describe her own

Carter uses this phrase
writing of the novel, in the Afterword to the revised
edition of Love, p. 113.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 290

III

Just as Landon and Punter identify Marianne in Heroes

and Villains as a New Woman figure, so Eve in The Passion

of New Eve is usually regarded as a more thorough

exploration of this same theme. Critics of the novel,

however, are disappointed or confused by a paradox in The

Passion: it appears to promise the definition of a

liberated female subject--a New Eve--and yet explicitly

seeks to displace and satirize the very notion of

identity. It is ironic that critics of a novel which is

so clearly concerned with its own demythologising

processes, in a bid to expose the patriarchal construction

of femininity and thereby challenge the very notion of the

subject, still appear to expect it to portray some sort of

alternative representation of woman, that is, the very

thing it to subvert. And yet, as we have seen, this

seeks

is irony is by the novel: Chapter 3

an which courted

argued that The Passion not only shows why such an

affirmative female subject cannot exist within patriarchal

it raised the possibility that such a

convention, also

thing (with the implication that it would

might exist

if there is an outside--
exist outside patriarchal society

suggests there is no
we have seen that Heroes and villains

such thing).

this raise an important

Critics' problems with novel

issue of feminist literature,

which affects all criticism

with regard to this novel:

and causes particular arguments
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ect? --I 291

what constitutes an affirmative feminism? It seems to me

that critics of The Passion are mistaken if their only

ideas of affirmative feminist action involve the depiction

of an alternative feminine consciousness. Rita Felski

uses Elaine Showalter's term 'gynocritical' to identify

this type of feminist criticism, which attempts 'to ground

a feminist aesthetic in women's experience, ' whether

defined as essential characteristics or as the consequence

of 'female socialization. '27 Felski also points out the

limitations of 'gynocritics, ' and in doing so raises

concerns which are important in Carter's work:

This kind of gynocritical position typically

operates with a conception of patriarchal
ideology as a homogeneous and uniformly
repressive phenomenon masking an authentic
female subjectivity, rather than conceding that
ideology needs to be understood as a complex
formation of beliefs, structures, and
which shapes and permeates the
representations
subjective sense of self of both men and women.
(Beyond Feminist Aesthetics p. 27)

It is to judge the value of The

clearly not possible

literature by asserting that it

Passion as feminist simply

fails of the female

to offer an affirmative representation

representation of Woman
subject, since such a positive

the kind 'ideology' which this

would conform to very of

However, as I will show, The

novel is seeking to unpack.

Passion does and explore the emancipatory

acknowledge

27 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics:

Rita
Change (London: Hutchinson
Feminist Literature and Social
is the work of
Radius, 1989), p. 25. Felski summarising
work which began with
important American feminist critics,
Showalter's A
Kate Millet's Sexual Politics and Elaine
TAc of thPi r Own
-
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 292
--I

potential of the desire for, or the struggle towards, a

symbolic, affirmative, and alternative female

consciousness, whilst at the same time engaging in a

demythologising process, exposing the 'complex formation

of beliefs, structures and representations' which shape

the subjectivity of both sexes--an activity which can also

be interpreted as affirmative.

The 'New Eve' in the title is the most obvious signal

that the novel is concerned with a New Woman figure. The

words 'New Eve' appear to signify the possibility of a new

start for the world--a rewriting of the first chapter of

the book of Genesis and a different representation of

Woman's role in the Fall. The importance of New Woman

figures in Carter's work in general, her previous

rewritings of the notion of a Fortunate Fall in The Magic

Toyshop and Heroes and Villains, and the fact that this is
28
a novel clearly concerned with questions of gender,

would support reading of the title. The Passion is

such a

also a novel which charts a series of new beginnings: at

the opening Evelyn is preparing for a complete

geographical job: he is moving from

change and a new

England to America, from 'the Old World to the New World'

(p. 37), to in life teaching in a New York

make a new start

in Evelyn's location is marked by

university. Each shift

'Fall' to be new chance to start

a and charts what appears

28 Journey of the Subject in

Ricarda Schmidt, 'The
Angela Carter's ' in Textual Practice, 3, No. 1
Fiction,
(Spring 1989), 56-75 (p. 61), writes, 'Carter makes gender
the decisive theme in The Passion of New Eve. '
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 293
--I

afresh. The most important shift occurs when Evelyn is

turned into a female version of himself.

However, The Passion also appears to belong to a

negative school of feminist thought, more concerned with a

process of what Ricarda Schmidt calls 'the unmasking of

patriarchal symbols of femininity as creations of male

desire, as images that correspond to no essence' ('The

Journey of the Subject, ' p. 64). At the same time as

suggesting an autonomous female consciousness, The Passion

also exhibits the impossibility of doing any such thing,

and exposes the notions of Woman we have as patriarchal

constructs which have no ontological status. Several

critics appear to have taken note of the 'New Eve'

mentioned in the title, which suggests the creation of a

New Woman, yet not one takes account of the first two

words, 'The Passion. ' The Passion of New Eve is an

ambiguous title which can be interpreted in terms of both

the Old the New Testament. That is, it can also be

and

read as a rewriting of the Passion of Christ, a history of

suffering in order to atone for the sins of Man. New Eve

can therefore be identified as a counterpart to

Christ--often referred to as the New Adam29--whose

29 Virgin Mary has traditionally

The New Testament
been labelled Eve (see John A. Philips, Eve: The
a Second
History An Idea, 131), this idea is also woven
of p. and
into Sophia tells Evelyn, 'You will be a
Carter's text:
Mary, too. Be glad! ' (p. 70).
new Eve And the Virgin
... that the model of Mary,
It is important to note, however,
and the notion of virgin birth, in The Passion, are part
of Mother's strategy, and are not necessarily connected
has been established, in a
with this New Eve's fate. Mary
for how women 'ought to
patriarchal society, as a model
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 294
--I

suffering brings to light and atones for the 'sins' of

patriarchy by illuminating the subordination and

manipulation of women. This is a reading of The Passion

as a retelling of the original interpretation of the

'Fortunate Fall, ' or felix culpa. In this the

way, novel

accounts for the suffering which promotes the

demythologising or dismantling of hierarchical concepts

underwriting patriarchal society, in order to prepare for

a fresh start. It is possible to read all of the

individual Falls described in this novel in this

palindromic fashion. As Schmidt very clearly documents,

the novel challenges 30

many accepted symbols of Woman,

destroying the false 'truths' of the old and the 'known, '

in order to create a New Woman.

Paulina Palmer is one of the disappointed critics.

She recognises and praises the necessary negativity

inherent in The Passion's critique of patriarchal notions

be' (Philips, p. 145), and this has angered many feminists.

They claim that the power of the myth resides in its
representation of an impossible state, as Barbara Hill
Rigney summarises in Lilith's Daughters: Women and
Religion in Contemporary Fiction (Wisconsin: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1982):

Mary Daly and Marina Warner share the conviction

that the paradox of Mary lies in her concurrent
virginity and motherhood, a state impossible to
emulate and therefore punitive in its fiction as
a model for women. (p. 37)

She is referring to Mary Daly's Beyond God the

Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), p. 62, and Marina Warner's
Alone of All her Sex (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 59.

30 description
See Schmidt's very clear and detailed
of the unpacking of these symbols of femininity, pp. 61-67.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 295
--I

of 'Woman, ' but at the same time she forcefully the

argues

pragmatic and political value of the portrayal of an

affirmative female consciousness as an alternative to

patriarchal structures. In her article 'From "Coded

Mannequin" to Bird Woman' Palmer argues that the

'demythologising' process taking place in The Passion gets

the upper hand and precludes any positive representation

of the feminine or representations of the sort of social

change which she feels is essential to challenge the

(p. 179). 31
patriarchal status quo In a complementary

argument, in Contemporary Women's Fiction, Palmer

complains that The Passion sets out, but fails, to portray

a distinctive and positive representation of femininity:

Carter's aim is to write 'a feminist tract about

the creation of femininity'. However, by
revealing female characters to be either
biologically male (as with Eve and Tristessa) or
to possess instrumental 'masculine' attributes
(as with Leilah) she does the very opposite. She
effectively erases femininity from the text.
This novel, in fact, contains no positive
representations of the feminine. (p. 19)

Palmer omits to register the change of name from Leilah to

Lilith, and the transformation of identity which such a

name change signifies. She therefore describes Leilah,

than Lilith, 'feminist freedom fighter' who is

rather as a

merely impersonating role. It is Lilith, as Palmer

a male

31 The Magic Toyshop and

Palmer also criticises
Heroes for their lack themes relating to
and Villains of
female specificity. Palmer endorses Terry Lovell's view,
in 'Writing A Question of Politics, '
cited Like a Woman:
that 'Successful struggles always depend on_
political
their to connect the belief and
ability with utopias--with
hope that things be better' ('From "Coded
might
Mannequin, "' p. 181).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 296
--I

described earlier, who possesses 'the instrumental

qualities of leadership--independence for

and a capacity

action and aggression--traditionally regarded as

masculine' (Contemporary Women's Writing, pp. 18-19). This

does not, however, challenge Palmer's that The

claim

Passion appears to offer no representations of authentic

female subjectivity at all.

Robert Clark, in 'Angela Carter's Desire Machine, '

also finds that The Passion fails to produce the promised

goods:

Carter's insight into the patriarchal

construction of femininity has a way of being
her blindness: her writing is often a feminism
in male chauvinist drag, a transvestite style,
and this may be because her primary allegiance
is to a postmodern aesthetics that emphasizes
the non-referential emptiness of definitions.
Such a commitment precludes an affirmative
feminism founded in referential commitment to
women's historical and organic being. Only in
patriarchal eyes is femininity an empty
category, the negation of masculinity. Beyond
patriarchal definitions of women there are
female definitions, and then feminist
definitions based upon a radical decon5ýruction
and reconstruction of women's history.

Clark, from a more overtly essentialist position, is

arguing for the same things as Palmer. He feels that the

novel is too concerned with its own demythologising

processes to offer an alternative feminine identity which

is based experience, that is 'an

upon a women's authentic

affirmative feminism founded in referential commitment to

women's historical being' (my emphasis). He

and organic

32 Carter's Desire Machine, '

Robert Clark, 'Angela
in Women's Studies--An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14, No. 2
(1987), 147-61 (p. 158).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 297
--I

praises the novel's depiction of 'femininity as a male

construct' ('Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' p. 158), but

argues that this should not prevent the novel from

offering alternative visions of women which are 'beyond

patriarchal definition. ' Because Carter limits herself to

demythologising conventional and patriarchal notions of

woman and does not attempt to rebuild an alternative

vision, Clark argues, her writing serves only to reinforce

the status quo: 'The recurrent figure of the puppet or

automaton seems a metaphor of the writing as a whole, a

dance to the puppet master's tune' ('Angela Carter's

Desire Machine, ' p. 159). 33

David Punter raises similar issues to Clark and

Palmer, but from a different angle. He interprets The

Passion as the depiction of a struggle between

symbolization--'writing, the formation of the new self,

the representation of Woman within woman'--and the forces

of history--'guns blazing. T34 However, the novel troubles

him:

33 Elaine Jordan's in 'Enthralment' are

arguments
structured around a critique of Clark's article, and she
specifically comments upon this passage:

Clark's appeal to the authentic experience of

real women is an attempt to articulate a static
and exclusive Marxism with the most restrictive
positive definition of
forms of feminism, whose
be trap us in
what women are or should
traditional definitions. (pp. 33-34)

34 David 'Angela Carter: Supersessions of

Punter,
the Masculine, ' in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction,
25, No. 4 (1984), 209-22 (p. 215).
The Liberation of the Female Sub-iect? 298
--I

As a male reader, I find myself the victim of

illusions. Although I am aware that Carter is a
woman, and although that extratextual
consciousness is incarnated within the text in
her obvious proximity to Leilah/Lilith, I
nonetheless find that the first-person narrative
of Evelyn/Eve appears to me throughout, no
matter what the overt sex at the time of the
Messiah, as a masculine narrative. When Evelyn
becomes Eve, my experience is of viewing a
masquerade; I read Eve still through the male
consciousness (Evelyn's) of what he has become.
It is as though Evelyn forms a barrier, a thin
film which stretches between Carter and Eve at
all points; and thus I too am forced to tread
that line, to respond as a male to the residual
male in Eve. (p. 218)

Here, in an otherwise cogent critical account of The

Passion, Punter makes a surprisingly naive connection

between the gender of the reader, the author, and the

characters in the novel. He is troubled by his sense that

Eve's narrative reads as if produced by a 'male

consciousness, ' and presents this as a problem arising out

of his own maleness. He intimates that Angela Carter, as

'extratextual consciousness, ' must necessarily be

associated with a particular character in the novel, and

maintains that this 'consciousness' cannot belong to Eve,

because 'Evelyn [a male consciousness] forms a barrier'

between them. He clarifies this assertion and compounds

the gender linkage by associating Carter with Leilah:

Carter this suggests, can only be

as a woman writer,

in the by a female character (the only

represented novel

'obvious proximity' between Carter and the character

be their and Punter has just

Leilah/Lilith appears to sex,

the that 'Carter is a woman'). From this

made point

perspective, if we were to agree with Punter's connection

The Liberation of the Female Subject? 299
--I

between author and character and tempted to try to

were

identify Eve as Carter's 'extratextual '

consciousness, or

as a New Woman, we would surely have to accept Clark's

claim that Carter's writing only serves to uphold the

status quo since it is 'a feminism in male chauvinist

drag' ('Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' p. 158).

Punter's main point. however, is a valid one: the

narrative voice does appear to be masculine, even when we

know that its source has undergone a sex-change operation.

The biological gender of the reader is, however, not the

issue, since, as I have argued in the previous chapter,

the novel attempts to locate all readers in the position

of the male gaze, whilst also problematising this

placement. It is therefore not difficult to account for

critics' anxiety when certain elements of Evelyn's

stereotypically male chauvinist character are never purged

from the narrative voice of Eve(lyn)'s retrospective

account, especially if the novel is read as promoting Eve

as a New Woman figure (or as Carter's textual

35 What to be pointed out, however, is

emanation). needs

that the novel self-consciously comments upon the specific

problem which Palmer, Clark and Punter raise concerning

the gender of the narrator.

The the in The Passion is an

gender of narrator

important and disturbing issue which remains unresolved.

Susan Suleiman comments, 'Evelyn's story--which unlike

35 is one in Chapter 4, I
This of the reasons why,
refer to Eve as 'he' and Tristessa as 'she. '
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 300

Orlando's, is narrated retrospectively in the first

person, thus immediately rais[es] the quintessentially

modern question: who speaks? '36 The retrospective

account resembles the old Desiderio's narrative in The

Infernal Desire Machines, which I discussed in Chapter 2,

but the older Eve(lyn) is never introduced as a character,

and his/her indeterminate gender adds further

complications. In the first part of the novel the

narrative voice appears to be that of a male

chauvinist--of Evelyn, in fact--whose attitude toward

women is not only derogatory but sadistic. For example,

at the cinema, during the opening pages, he describes his

companion and sums up his relationships with women in

general:

As far as I can remember, this girl had grey

eyes and a certain air of childlike hesitancy.
I always liked that particular quality in a
woman for my nanny, although sentimental, had
had a marked sadistic streak and I suppose I
must have acquired an ambivalent attitude
towards women from her. Sometimes I'd amuse
myself by tying a girl to the bed before I
copulated with her. Apart from that, I was
perfectly normal. (p. 9)

The content of this description speaks for itself and the

tone is detached, self-confident and throwaway, as if the

girls he 'copulated' with were themselves disposable.

Only once Evelyn has been incarcerated at Beulah and

transformed into Eve are we made aware that the narrative

36 the Body: The

Susan Suleiman, '(Re)writing
Politics and Poetics of F emale Eroticism, ' in The Female
Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives,
edited by Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 7-29 (p. 25).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 301
--I

voice, which has been telling the story in retrospect, is

perhaps female. The novel, however, never finally insists

that Eve completely becomes a woman: after his/her sex

change operation Eve's psycho-surgery proves unsuccessful

and, when Eve escapes into the desert, s/he insists: 'I

have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's

shape. Not a woman, no; both more and less than a real

woman' (p. 83). As the narrative progresses it is

suggested that the gap between Eve's psychological and

physical self decreases--while with Zero, Eve claims

ambiguously that 'I had become almost the thing I was'

(p. 107)--yet as Eve escapes the desert s/he still feels

like 'Eve and Adam both' (p. 165). Even after the cave

journey the now-pregnant Eve's gender remains problematic.

What is made clear, however, is that even by the end of

the novel, Eve remains socially unassimilable: Lilith

offers him/her the choice between being transformed back

into a biological man, or social exclusion: 'She gave me

my exile, since I did not want my old self back' (p. 188).

Eve, however, does not accept her/his exile and the novel

suggests further adventures following on from the series

charted its began to wonder if I might

within pages--'I
37--as if Eve and the
not in some way escape' (p. 188).

action continued beyond the novel. It is, however,

Eve(lyn)'s 'difference' from both sexes, and detachment,

37 The word 'escape' also refer to death, but,

could
if death is portrayed the of the novel, it is
at end
described in terms of an adventure.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 302
--I

generated by his/her complex gender status and the

unspecified time lapse between the events of the story and

their telling, which appear to stabilise the narrative.

This apparent stability enables readers to judge Evelyn in

the way that I have done, and encourages readers to assume

shared values of common decency which invite disapproval

of Evelyn. The shared disapproval, however, is also

disturbing, because it can be, read as if it were

scandalous: that is, it also appeals to a predominantly

male audience as both shocking but also titillating

material.

This complexly gendered narrator, however, whose

'experience came through two channels of sensation, her

own fleshly ones and his mental ones' (pp. 77-78), also

performs an important part of the demythologising

machinery of this novel. The dual gender element of the

narrative is a fundamental part of the demythologising

process because, as Punter points out, it undercuts the

authority of the male point of view: 'The structures of

hermaphroditism operate within the perceiving subject

itself, so that the gaze is dislocated at source'

38 Punter,
('Supersessions of the Masculine, ' p. 209).

then, identifies the narrative perspective as

hermaphroditic, whereas Clark identifies it as

38 statement points to this to

The footnote attached
the work of Jacques Lacan, specifically The Four
Fundamental Concepts edited by J. A.
of Psychoanalysis,
Miller, translated by A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1977) pp. 67-119.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 303

transvestite. I would hesitate to give it either of these

titles, with all their complex connotations; indeed, no

single term seems adequate. Carter's technique destroys

the possibility of single focus: all perception is

blurred, disrupted and made strange. This is a surrealist

technique, and it is shown very clearly at work, for

example, when Evelyn first meets Mother in Beulah.

Everything is made strange for Evelyn, and he has to

change the way he reads himself, when he realises that in

Mother's world his penis no longer symbolizes his mastery

of the situation: 'It was nothing but a decorative

appendage Since I had no notion how to approach her

...

with it, she rendered it insignificant; I must deal with

her on her own terms' (p. 60). Because Evelyn is forced to

give up his male point of view, he is forced to

acknowledge it is not a universal standpoint. I am using

'point in two different ways here, both as male

of view'

opinion, and also to denote the narrative perspective.

These two different points of view are often thought

but therefore the reader, is

synonymous, Evelyn, and

forced their difference when he is forced

to acknowledge

to ways of reading. In
realise the possibility of other

this the dramatises Carter's

way narrative perspective

argument, discussed in the previous chapter, which reveals

demystifies, the
the enormous power of, but simultaneously

by exposing it as
apparently universal male point of view

a patriarchal construct.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 304
--I

Typically, this argument can be described most

clearly in terms of a paradox. On one hand, The Passion

offers glimpses of alternative perspectives, which include

the possibility of affirmative hermaphroditic or

39 The
matriarchal viewpoints. novel portrays many of

these alternative perspectives as visions of the future of

America: the country is in the midst of civil war where

patriarchal order and control have collapsed and a whole

collection of 'marginal' groups are fighting to take power

and reshape society according to new conventions. These

groups include, for example, a take-over by Mother's

matriarchal guerrillas, who are succeeded by the feminist

freedom fighters represented by Lilith at the end of the

novel. There are also the boys of the 'Children's

Crusade' (p. 159) who aim to reinscribe patriarchal order,

travelling across the desert to wage a 'Holy

and are west

War' against all the 'marginal' groups, 'Blacks, Mexis,

Reds, Militant Lesbians, Rampant Gays, etc etc etc'

(p. 161)
.
It is these as I will show by
glimpses which,

describing both the hermaphroditic and matriarchal visions

upon, and which help

explored by the novel, critics seize

suggest that this novel sets out to portray an affirmative

future. On the other hand, however, each

and alternative

alternative is also self-reflexively criticised

viewpoint

39 in the introduction to this

As I mentioned
important idea through all of Carter's
chapter, an running
work is that of seeing things from new, often women's,
perspectives.
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ect? 305
--I

within the novel and exposed as a patriarchal

construction. Indeed, this novel appears to offer a

critique of all possible positions, which, as critics have

pointed out, necessarily precludes any possibility of a

final concrete alternative answer. It also shows that

within patriarchal convention, there can be no concrete

alternative versions of femininity; it is this last point

which the novel dramatises so powerfully by effacing

femininity from the text. This, of course, makes the

position of the critic very difficult since it becomes

impossible to tie the novel down to any one position, or

even any two. The task of criticism is also difficult

since, as I shall outline below, very often the problems

outlined by the critics have been prefigured by the novel

itself.

Ricarda Schmidt and Paulina Palmer both identify the

New Woman figure emerges during the course of the

which

novel or hermaphroditic answer to the

as an androgynous

problems Schmidt claims that 'androgyny

of patriarchy.

flickers up as a vision of a way out of the present gender

division' ('The Journey the Subject, ' p. 73), and Palmer

of

'Carter the trans-sexual Evelyn/Eve to

writes: presents

us as the ideal feminist, the perfect woman constructed

according to an androgynous blueprint' (Contemporary

Women's Both critics,

Writing, p. 19, my emphasis).

however, the hermaphroditic answer to

associate
trend, and both outline
patriarchal domination as a 1970's
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 306

and document the deficiencies the 40

of concept. Ricarda
Schmidt describes the importance the
of symbol of
hermaphroditism in the novel: she argues that Eve's

vision at the end of her cave journey, 'a

of miraculous,

seminal, intermediate being whose [she had]

nature grasped
in the desert' (The Passion, p. 185) was glimpsed earlier
in the novel during the love-making Tristessa
of and Eve

in the desert, when they 'made the Platonic

great

hermaphrodite together' (The Passion, p. 148). She claims:

They fill the desert's vast emptiness with the

mirages of all their conceptions of femininity
and masculinity. They project them upon each
other and merge them into the imaginary
wholeness of a hermaphroditic being in their
love-m king. ('The Journey of the Subject, '
p. 64)4

However, Schmidt is disturbed by the traditional gender

roles adopted by Eve and Tristessa in this scene, roles

which are reinforced in the language used to describe it,

which 'still equates active pursuit with masculinity and

docile submission with femininity. ' Schmidt finally

concludes that 'hermaphroditism still adheres to the

phallogocentric rule of the One and denies difference'

('The 42 finds
Journey of the Subject, ' p. 66). Palmer

40 See Ricarda Schmidt, 'The Journey the

of
Subject, ' p. 66, and Paulina Palmer Contemporary Women's
Fiction, pp. 19-20.
41 75, footnote 21) to
Schmidt goes on (p. criticise
David Punter's argument in The Hidden Script: Writing and
the Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985),
p. 42, where he describes the 'lifeless mating of Eve and
Tristessa. '

42 Julia Kristeva makes a similar comment when

arguing for the dismantling of the opposition man/woman,
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 307
--I

nothing to celebrate in the presentation of what she calls

'trans-sexuality. ' She criticises the to female
male

trans-sexual 'as a threat to women's liberation, ' and

argues that the male to female trans-sexual is 'not a

woman at all but an anomalous hybrid created by a

patriarchal culture with the aim of usurping woman's place

and power' (Contemporary Women's 43

Fiction, p. 20).
Carter does appear to play with the notion of

androgyny, or at least a Tiresian knowledge of both

genders, as a possible alternative vision of the future:

Eve describes him/herself sardonically as 'the Tiresias of

Southern California' (p. 71). Carter recounts in an

interview in Spare Rib (November 1985, p. 37) that The

Passion started off with a radical mis-remembering of the

myth of Tiresias. Her mis-remembering concerns the final

part of the story when Tiresias claims that women take

greater pleasure in sexual intercourse than men. Carter

mis-remembers Juno's (Hera's) response, saying that

instead of blinding him she was 'so furious that she

turned him back into a woman again and it's always

...

in 'Women's Time, ' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and

Society, 7, No. 1 (1981), 13-35. She claims that she is
'not simply suggesting a very hypothetical bisexuality'
since this 'would only, in fact, be the aspiration toward
the totality of one of the sexes and thus an effacing of
difference' (p. 34).

43 draws Mary Daly,

For evidence, Palmer upon
Gyn/Ecoloav: the Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 67-68,71-2; and Janice Raymond,
The Transsexual Empire (London: Women's Press, 1980).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 308

seemed to me that this was perfectly just punishment. »44

However, the novel also self-consciously problematises the

notion of hermaphroditism, and dramatises the very

criticisms offered by both Palmer and Schmidt. The

quotation describing the love-making Tristessa

of and Eve,

for example, which Schmidt chooses in to

order show how

stereotypical gender roles are maintained, reads as

follows:

when [Tristessa]
you lay below me ... I beat
down upon
you mercilessly, with atavistic
relish, but the glass woman I saw beneath me
smashed under my passion and the splinters
scattered and recomposed themselves into a man
who overwhelmed me. (p. 149)

This could also be interpreted as the novel's own self-

reflexive criticism of the hermaphroditic model. This

passage shows the reversibility of gender roles--Eve and

Tristessa take 'turn and turn about, now docile, now

virile' (p. 149)--but whilst the splintering and

reconstructing process described suggests the creation of

something new, Tristessa and Eve are only 'recomposed'

into recognisable gender roles and remain trapped within

convention. This is a critique of the model of

44
In Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural
Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1988), Catherine R. Stimpson
offers five definitions of androgyny, one of which may be
useful for interpretations of The Passion. This describes
a 'physical hermaphrodite, ' a 'mythical and mystical
being, ' which

may symbolize balance, reconciliation, and the

unity of such binary opposites as female and
male, earth and sun, dark and light, cold and
hot. Or, it may symbolize wisdom, a creature
able to grasp the totality of experience of both
sexes. (p. 54)
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ject? 309
--I

hermaphroditism which Catherine R. Stimpson has described

very clearly in Where the Meanings Are:

The androgyne must ultimately face a logical

...
dilemma. It may endorse freedom of erotic
preference, but it cannot support freedom of
sexual role. By definition, the androgyne
demands the blending and merging of masculine
and feminine roles ...
The androgyne still fundamentally thinks in
terms of 'feminine' and 'masculine. ' It fails
to conceptualise the world and to organize
phenomena in a new way that leave 'feminine' and
'masculine' behind. (pp. 57-58)

Similarly, The Passion clearly reveals that whilst

Eve plays out a stereotypical female role, s/he also

becomes aware of the masochistic and self-annihilatory

impulses which construct it. S/he becomes both object and

stereotypical 'consumable' woman:

I looked down at my slow limbs; they were

already dusted with sand, like a fine, golden
powder and I thought, how delicious I look! I
look like a gingerbread woman. Eat me. Consume
45
me.

Here we were at the beginning or end of the

I, in flesh, was in
world and my sumptuous
myself the fruit of the tree of knowledge;
knowledge had made me, I was a man-made
masterpiece of skin and gone, the technological
Eve in person. (p. 146)4

45 Perhaps the most striking novels concerned

one of
the notion of woman as consumable is Margaret
with
Atwood's The Edible Woman (1969) (London: Virago,
novel
1980). Marian, the heroine of the story becomes anorexic,
to consume food. She breaks her fast only
and unable any
at the end of the novel when she has baked a cake shaped
her boyfriend refuses to
and decorated as a woman, which
but also liberatingly, she begins
eat; then, disturbingly,
to eat it herself.
46 this image again to describe the
Carter uses
Duval Baudelaire in 'Black
relationship between Jeanne and
Venus': 'She is Eve but, herself, the forbidden
not
fruit, he has eaten her! ' (p. 15). However, on the
and
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 310

Evelyn is consumable both as gingerbread woman and as

forbidden fruit. Eve describes her/himself here, not as a
New Eve, but as a 'man-made' product, in other words s/he

spells out clearly her constitution as a synthetic

patriarchal construct.

This self-consciousness is also signalled in the

novel by means of the much-repeated trope of reflecting

eyes. Tristessa tells Eve not to look at him/her, that

is, to avoid the binary roles where one sex is reflected

in (defined by) the other. But Eve is to take this

unable

advice, plays out the stereotype, sees her/himself

reflected in Tristessa's eyes, and becomes the object s/he

sees in the reflection: 'I did not close my eyes for I

saw in his face how beautiful I was' (p. 151).

Schmidt and Palmer's other criticism, that androgyny

necessarily privileges one gender over the other, is also

prefigured and dramatised within the novel. After

Tristessa has been murdered in the desert, Eve finds that

she has temporarily become Tristessa (the symbol of

everything a woman 'should be'):

I was free to run away, to run back to the grave

in the sand, to lie down upon it and there to
waste away from sorrow. I was very much struck
by the emblematic beauty of this idea; to die
for love! So much had I become the mortal,
deathward-turning aspect of Tristessa. (p. 162)

Hence, one side of the hermaphroditic being that Eve and

Tristessa became is to dominate the other: as if

shown

same page, the narrative describes how Duval also eats

Baudelaire: 'Black Helen's lips suck the marrow from the
poet's spirit' (p. 15).
The Liberation of the Female Sub-iect? 311
--I

Eve has been 'consumed' by, and become, the patriarchal

notion of the ideal Woman.

Most critics recognize that The Passion demystifies

not only patriarchal convention but its antithesis, the

matriarchal alternative. Paulina Palmer reads for signs

of 'positive' celebrations of women's relationships and

women's communities ('From "Coded Mannequin, "' p. 190), and

is therefore disappointed by Carter's satirical

description of Mother's 'matriarchal guerilla fighters, '

including Lilith. Gina Wisker claims: that 'the Great

Mother is as much a parody as the supersexist Zero in The

Passion of New Eve. '47 Elaine Jordan describes Mother as

'inversely phallic, female to the nth degree'; this, she

claims, is Carter's 'critique of women's "feminine"

behaviour, and of some [separatist] feminist programmes'

('Enthralment, ' p. 36). Ricarda Schmidt, in her very

polished and convincing analysis of this novel, states

that 'A to the times of matriarchy is

return mythical

('The Journey the Subject, '

rejected as a dead end' of

48 how Carter biological

p. 73). Schmidt explains satirises

47Gina Wisker, 'Winged Women and Werewolves: How

do we read Angela Carter? ' in Ideas and Production: A
Journal in the History Ideas, Issue 4: Poetics (1986),
of
87-98 (p. 89).
48 in the Schmidt points out
Earlier same article,
between two rulers, Mother in The
similarities would-be
Passion Dr Hoffman in The Infernal Desire Machines of
and
Dr Hoffman:

Like Dr Hoffman in the former novel, Mother

wants to make something imaginary concrete and
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 312
--I

essentialism (which Clark believes is indispensable to the

feminist cause), and the female separatist (which

option

Palmer appears to take 49

seriously). The Amazons, she

writes, 'celebrate femininity as motherhood, the

architecture of their city is modelled on the womb. Their

fight against patriarchy is expressed in the the

emblem of
broken phallus' ('The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 62).

Beulah, Mother, and her followers all appear to be

situated totally outside of patriarchal convention, and

yet, as the novel shows clearly, they are defined totally

in terms of the very conventions they claim to reject.

Mother's 'feminist freedom fighters, ' for example, whilst

celebrating femininity, are defined in terms of male

aggression (which is what Palmer objects to)--their

training

involved not only target practice and work with

explosive devices, nuclear hand-weapons and
limited range missiles but bayonet charges, the
taking of fortified positions by assault and
charges through barricades improvised from
thorns and spikes. (p. 79)

Similarly, Eve, their 'ideal woman' (p. 78), is expected to

model herself upon hundreds of male artists' depictions of

the Madonna and Child, and all of Tristessa's movies which

real; and like him she wants to end historical

time. In this attempt both figures are unmasked
as tyrannical. (p. 63)
49 her non-fictional
In 'The Language of
article,
Sisterhood, ' in The State of the Language, edited by
Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1980), pp. 226-34, Carter
outlines some of her objections to separatism, claiming
that 'there is a fictive quality about the notion of a
universality of "women only" experience' (p. 231).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 313
--I

represent the ultimate in patriarchal conformity (p. 72).

This ironic argument is supported by the novel's use of

intertextuality to describe Beulah and its inhabitants,

which not only relies upon texts by men, but texts which

are particularly concerned with gender issues. The very

name of the underground hideaway, Beulah, recalls, for

example, the writing of John Bunyan and William Blake.

Schmidt points out that both of these poets represent a

'male vision of conciliatory femininity and of sexual

union of man and woman, ' and 'Blake's daughters of Beulah

exist only in relation to the male, for the male, and

...
in man's imagination' ('The Journey of the Subject, '

50 importance humour
p. 62). Schmidt also stresses the of

in this novel, and, citing examples from the extraordinary

rituals with which Mother surrounds herself, she describes

how the novel avoids taking the matriarchal alternative to

patriarchy too seriously: 'Mother's glorification of the

womb, female space, biological essentialism (which stands

for one position within the women's movement in the

1970's), is satirized in its involuntarily comic self-

pronunciation' ('The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 63).

Both the hermaphroditic and the matriarchal

the future, which appear to be

alternative visions of

therefore shown, ironically, to be

outside convention, are

50 to John
Schmidt makes specific references
Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1960), Blake's 'Milton, ' and 'A Vision
p. 155, and William
' in The Complete Writings of William
of the Last Judgment,
Blake, by Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Random House,
edited
1958), pp. 418,493,516 and 614.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 314

constructs of the very conventions they appear to negate.

The same might be said of criticism of the novel itself.

This criticism may appear to be detached and outside the

novel, but is, of course, rooted within the novel itself.

This is dramatized in The Passion and is signalled by the

novel's self-conscious prefiguring of critical problems,

which forms part of the demythologising process. There is

no utopian space outside of convention from which to

challenge patriarchal society, and no place outside the

novel from which to criticise, only the suggestion that

such a place exists; moreover, the very notion of such a

space outside convention is itself conventional.

Given the demythologising and self-reflexive nature

this the only way in which it can suggest the

of novel,

possibility of a New Woman figure is through paradox.

Critics argue that the process of demythologising which

appears to dominate the novel precludes the possibility of

figure, I argue that it is this

creating such a yet would

very process which makes the existence of an alternative

feminine consciousness more thinkable.

and affirmative

itself is thematised in the

The demythologising process

Passion Christ; it can be

novel as a rewriting of the of

or purifying process which prepares

read as a cleansing

the way for a new beginning.

is then, celebrates the

This a novel, which

death resurrection. There

possibility of change via and

is throughout the
an alchemical metaphor which recurs
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 315
--I

novel, representing this particular process of

transformation: it describes many instances of

dissolution into a chaos that contains the possibility of

restructuring. Baraslav the alchemist has informed

Evelyn: 'We must plunge into this cauldron of chaos, we

must offer ourselves to night, to dark, to death. Who may

not be resurrected if, first, he has not died? ' (p. 14, see

also pp. 16,44, and 150). The alchemical metaphor

suggests transmutation from one state to another. It

suggests dissolution into chaos, but, just as Baraslav

turns red powder, mercury, borax and nitrate into gold

(p. 14), so the recurring alchemical metaphor also implies

the possibility of transforming something common into

something new and precious. Eve's creation, for example,

is described as just such an alchemical transmutation:

Beulah is 'a crucible' (p. 49), Mother is 'queen of the

crucible' (p. 61), and Eve, partly created in the

'reflected light' (p. 72) of Tristessa's movies, is turned

from a stereotype male chauvinist into a singular being.

Baraslav's defines 'Chaos' as:

'the earliest state of disorganised creation,

blindly impelled towards the creation of a new
of phenomena of hidden meanings. The
order
fructifying chaos of anteriority, the state
before the beginning of the beginning. '
(p. 14) 51

51 Clark, in 'Angela Carter's Desire

Robert
Machine, ' can explanation for the
see no positive
valorisation of chaos at the end of the novel:

It is that the end of the

scarcely any wonder
to images of the Earth Mother that
novel resorts
Carter derided in The Sadeian Woman [p. 5] and
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 316

And this is echoed at the end the

of novel when Eve

claims, 'Here we were at the beginning the

or end of

world' (p. 146). This state of anteriority be

could said
to represent a clean slate or blank 'embraces
page which

all opposing forms in a state of undifferentiated

dissolution' (p. 14). (This is another the

example of

'tabula rasa' image which recurs across Carter's )

work.

The process of demystification is thematised in the

narrative as a process of dissolution, and it takes on

several forms. It can be interpreted as one long Fall, or

a series of different Falls, towards knowledge and also

towards 52
chaos. As Ricarda Schmidt claims, the long Fall

takes the form into 53

symbolic of a descent a labyrinth,

culminates in incomprehensible political chaos.

(pp. 157-58)
52 include in
These symbolic Falls the change
Evelyn's life when he 'falls' for Leilah. He tastes of
the forbidden fruit Leilah has to offer (Leilah may
represent either Satan or 'Old Eve'), 'I kissed her. Her
mouth had a strange flavour, like that of those mysterious
fruits, such as the medlar, that are not fit to eat until
they are rotten; her tongue was incandescent, ' and he
leaves his own apartment to move in with her, since:

I felt all the ghastly attraction of the fall.

Like a man upon a precipice, irresistibly lured
by gravity, I succumbed at once. I took the
quickest way down, I plunged. I could not
resist the impulsion of vertigo. (p. 25)

There are many other examples: Eve almost falls when

he meets Tristessa and looks into his/her eyes (p. 125);
s/he falls when forced to consummate the double marriage
to Tristessa, after which Eve claims 'I got off the bed
and looked for some rag to cover my nakedness because I
had grown suddenly ashamed of it' (p. 138); and falls once
again in the cave at the end of the novel (p. 183).

53
The image of labyrinths through which characters
journey is another favourite of Carter's. See for
example, Several Perceptions, in which Anne leads Joseph
 The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 317

and Evelyn's narrative is punctuated with references to

this journey:

DESCEND LOWER. YOU have not reached the end of

the maze, yet. (p. 49)

I have not reached the end of the maze yet.

descend lower, descend lower. I must go
further. (p. 150)

And this Fall/journey is also portrayed as one of

introspection:

Descend lower, descend the diminishing spirals

of being that restore us to our source. Descend
lower; while the world, in time, forward
goes
and so presents us with the illusion of motion,
though all our lives we move through the
curvilinear galleries of the brain towards the
core of the labyrinth within us. (p. 39)

It can be interpreted as a journey into the centre of

Evelyn's 'brain-maze of interiority' (p. 56) and also the
54
womb. It takes the concrete form of descending the

labyrinth of Beulah--which is also identified as both womb

(p. 52) and brain (p. 58)--and the journey into the cave at

the end of the novel--which becomes both Mother and Eve's

Womb.

home one night: 'Her hand was a clue leading him through
a labyrinth' (p. 101). It is used again in Love to
describe Lee, Buzz and Annabel's destructive relationship:
'In the sequence of events which now drew the two brothers
and the girl down, in ever-decreasing spirals, to the
empty place at the centre of the labyrinth they had built
between them' (p. 101). It is also used to describe the
forest into which the children venture in 'Penetrating to
the Heart of the Forest, ' in Fireworks (p. 53).

54 the
By identifying the womb and brain so closely,
novel is exposing what Mary Eilmann, in her wonderful
book, Thinking about Women (1968) (London: Virago, 1979),
p. 12, calls, 'the most popular route of association ...
between the female reproductive organs and the female
mind. ' In The Passion, however, the stereotype is made
strange by Eve(lyn)'s dual gender. Her body is female but
his mind appears to male.
remain
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 318
--I

The process of dissolution/Fall/journey also takes

the form of a regression through time: 'Time is running

back on itself' (p. 183), to a pre-Oedipal state before

gender differentiation, that is, to the mother/child

before intervention by the Father. 55 In

relationship

Beulah Eve returns to a pre-Oedipal state of auto-

eroticism where s(he) is both the subject and the object

of his/her own desire:

She [Mother] beckoned my towards her, unbuttoned

the front of her white coat, took me to her
breasts and suckled me. Then I felt a great

55 Sylvia Bryant, in 'Re-Constructing Oedipus

Through "Beauty and The Beast, "' in Criticisms: A
Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 31, No. 4 (Fall
1989), 439-53, describes a similar process taking place in
Carter's short story 'The Tiger's Bride' from The Bloody
Chamber. She identifies the 'girl's desires' in this
story as 'pre-Oedipal, almost pre-ideological' (p. 448).
Clare Hanson, in 'Each Other, ' claims the same about one
of the Black Venus stories:

In 'The Cabinet of Edgar Alan Poe' aspects of

sexuality and sexual identity are explored in
ways which transcend gender, and gender
prejudice. Perhaps this is simply because
Carter explores in this story areas of
experience which predate our acquisition of a
sexed, gendered identity. (p. 81)

Interestingly, Freud wrote a letter to Jung in which

he links the Eve and the Oedipal myths via the mediation
the idea incest (a image in The
of of Mother powerful
Passion), Freud writes (The
and the notion of reversal.
Freud Jung Letters (1974), edited by William McGuire,
by Alan McGlashan (London: Picador, 1979) (17
abridged
December 1911)) :

There is something very strange and singular

about the creation of Eve. Rank recently called
to the fact that the Bible story
my attention
may quite well have reversed the original myth.
be clear; Eve would be
Then everything would
Adam's be dealing with the
mother, and we should
known of mother-incest, the
well motif
punishment for etc. (pp. 251-52)
which
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 319

peace and a sense of reconciliation. It seemed

the breasts I suckled could be exhausted
never
but would always flow with to nourish
milk me
and my relation to the zone of mother had not
changed and could never change for Little
Oedipus had lived in a land of milk and kindness
before his father taught him to how to stab with
his phallus and baby's to the breasts
relation
bears no relation to his or hers. (p. 75)

Only in her/his relation to Mother does Eve(lyn) feel able

to cope with his/her state of undifferentiation. The cave
journey marks a final return to Mother's finally
womb and

a state of undifferentiation between Eve and Mother: and

therefore Eve once more gives birth to herself:

A brackish and marine smell now fills my

nostrils, the odour of the sea within me.

The walls of meat expelled me. (p. 186)

The novel draws an explicit link between this process of

returning to the womb and the alchemical process. Eve's

vision includes the image of a foal returning to its

mother's womb: 'She herself becomes smaller and smaller

until, in the alchemical vase, she becomes a solution of

amino-acids and a tuft of hair, and then dissolves into

the amniotic sea' (p. 186).

Ricarda Schmidt describes 'the ocean, ' to which Eve

commits herself at the very end of the novel, as 'both a

symbol of the womb and the grave' ('The Journey of the

Subject, ' p. 66). The ending of this novel describes a

death scene, but also a scene of prophecy and the

suggestion of resurrection, rebirth and of the

regeneration of 'a new order of phenomena. ' References to

both death and birth are made explicit. The old woman
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 320
--I

outside the cave at the end of the novel, for example,

refers to her boat, which Eve steals, her

as coffin

(p. 189), and Eve uses the ingot of alchemical 'to

gold pay

the fatal ferryman' (p. 183), in order to the

set out on

last journey of the 56 However, is

novel. Eve pregnant as

she sets out across the ocean--she explains, 'I myself

will soon produce a tribute to evolution' (p. 186)--and the

very last sentence of the novel announces the importance

of this forthcoming event: 'Ocean, ocean, mother of

bear 57
mysteries, me to the place of birth' (p. 191).

Critics tend to characterise the ending of the novel

as a death scene. David Punter picks up on an affirmative

note, but attributes this to what he interprets as a

liberation brought about through death:

Eve, perhaps, has achieved freedom, although not

through any particular actions of her own; it is
rather as though, having proved useful in the
incarnation of an idea, she may now be allowed
to recede from the processes of history. In
this respect she is rather like those Old
Testament figures who, having had their all
spent in one act of supernatural service to God
are permitted to short circuit the processes
...
of life and death and to retire exhausted and,
we may perhaps hypothesise, still only half-

56 Subject, '
Schmidt, in 'The Journey of the
identifies old as 'a modern version of Charon, '
woman
p. 66.
57 Perceptions are
Both Shadow Dance and Several
concerned with the idea of rebirth. Near the end of
Shadow Dance Morris feels though he was acting as his
as
(p. 162), and he is
own midwife at his own rebirth'
thrilled (whom he imagined
when his favourite waitress
Honeybuzzard had scared to death) reappears: 'The
suddenness of her was miraculous. Lazarus
resurrection
She was alive' (p. 163). Similarly, Joseph, in Several
...
Perceptions, imagines himself reborn after his suicide
attempt, and his friend Viv him Lazarus (p. 25).
calls
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 321

comprehending. From her part in the continuous

cycle of the desert Eve is allowed out to
that ...
other sand, to the far beach the
... where
absolute ocean forbids further development.
('Supersessions of the Masculine, ' p. 217)

Schmidt's interpretation of the ending of the novel is

very compelling. She identifies Eve's journey through the
cave as

a visionary journey.... Eve sees evolution

unfold backwards until she has a vision the
of
legendary bird archaeopteryx....

This bird, a combination of contrarieties,

symbolizes a wholeness before the separation
into two different strands of evolution. ('The
Journey of the Subject, ' p. 65)
The 'archaeopteryx, ' as a vision of the future, represents
'bird and lizard both at once, a being composed of the

contradictory elements of air and earth.... A miraculous,

seminal, intermediate being' (p. 185). 58 Schmidt also

claims that the child Eve is to give birth to can be read

as referring to 'the birth of a new symbol of femininity,

born of the desire to overcome the traditional division of

human beings into the stereotypes of femininity and

masculinity' (p. 67). Without recognition of the model of

the Passion of Christ, though, Schmidt is unable to

assimilate the images of death and birth which coexist at

the end of the novel. She is confused, for instance,

about the status of the first person narrator. Schmidt

asks:

58 In 'The Journey the Subject, ' 65, Schmidt

of p.
identifies the archaeopteryx with what she takes to be the
novel's valorizing of hermaphroditism. Hence Schmidt's
criticisms of the utopian qualities of hermaphroditism
qualify her reading of the positive message at the ending
of the novel.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 322
--I

If Eve dies in the ocean, when would she have

told her story?... At the end of the novel we
are left with the paradox that the narrator who
very probably died must yet have survived to
tell her tale.

Just in case readers have forgotten that this is

story a

retrospective account from some untold time in the future,

the last page of the novel reminds them (in the same way

that the last section of The Infernal Desire Machines of

Doctor Hoffman does) by returning to the narrator's

59
present:

And all this strange experience, as I remember

it, confounds itself in a fugue. At night,
dreaming, I go back again to Tristessa's house,
that echoing mansion, that hall of mirrors in
which my whole life was lived, the glass
mausoleum that had been the world and now is
smashed. He himself often comes to me in the
night, serene in his marvellous plumage of white
hair, with the fatal red hole in his breast;
after many, many embraH s, he vanishes when I
open my eyes. (p. 191)

This passage associates Tristessa with Christ, since it is

Tristessa who is resurrected in Eve's dreams, bearing his

59 Schmidt the between

also points out similarities
the narratives of The Passion and of The Infernal Desire
Machines!

In both Hoffman and Eve we have first-person

narration from the point of view of posterity.
The heroes their adventures in the past
narrate
tense long after they have completed them.
Their narratives are full of cryptic hints at
to come, insights still to be gained, and
events
explanations in the light of experiences which
take place much later in the chronology of
events. (p. 66)

60 in The Infernal Desire Machines,

Desiderio,
describes his in the same terms: 'And,
memories
sometimes, when I think of my journey everything
...
to have happened in a kind of fugue
seem[s] all at once,
(p. 13). The love of his life, Albertina,
of experience'
in his dreams to vanish when he awakes
also appears only
(pp"25-26)
.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --I 323

fatal wound. Both Schmidt and Lorna Sage describe the end
of The Passion in terms of 'contradictions, '

'uncertainties, ' and 'problems. ' Schmidt argues that

these arise because

after the destruction both of the old

patriarchal symbols and of the feminist revival
of the matriarchal ones, the course of the
heroine's future journey be foretold,
cannot yet
since new symbols (of which Eve has had but a
glimpse) have yet to be created on a social
level.... What becomes of her remains an open
question. ('The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 66)

Similarly, Sage comments:

The ending [of The Passion], with new Eve

pregnant but really still preoccupied with
giving birth to herself, seemed to me to have
the problems of prophecy: we don't know what
will emerge from rethinking sexual stereotypes.
('The Savage Sideshow, ' p. 57)

The interpretation of the novel as a rewriting of the

Passion of Christ does allow these contraries to coexist;

it encompasses both the death of one system and the

possible birth of another. The journey/fall, then, which

shapes the whole narrative, therefore maps a double

process--of dissolution or alchemical breakdown into chaos

but also of growth toward knowledge (Punter describes this

as 'the evolution into chaos' ('Supersessions of the

Masculine, ' p. 215)), out of which something precious might

be created. Importantly, however, this 'something, ' Eve

and Tristessa's baby, remains only a projection at the end

of the narrative, and is not born within the confines of

the novel.

The baby expected at the end of the novel may be

interpreted as the New Woman figure this novel appears to

The Liberation of the Female Subject? 324
--I

promise. Schmidt, for example, claims that 'Eve believes

that the child she conceived by Tristessa will the

signify

beginning of a new species, symbolically speaking' ('The

Journey of the Subject, ' p. 66). Robert Clark, in 'Angela

Carter's Desire Machine, ' introduces The Passion as

'Carter's most ambitious commentary on gender and

gendering, the basic plot concerning the conversion of the

archetypal male chauvinist Evelyn into the New Eve, a

woman whose self-fertilized child "will rejuvenate the

world"' ('Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' p. 156, quoting

from The Passion, p. 77). Clark, however, fails to make a

distinction between Mother's matriarchal dream of Eve as a

self-sufficient being who can 'seed' and 'fruit'

her/himself (p. 76), 61

and Eve's relationship with

Tristessa. The baby, the novel makes perfectly clear, has

been conceived out of doubleness, of the mating of 'two

fathers and two mothers' (p. 187). This child conceived

61Eve would be self-sufficient thanks to

only
Mother's 'divine' intervention (via rape, a complete
restructuring of Evelyn's body, followed by the projected
insemination is
artificial of Evelyn's own sperm), which
highlighted by a parody of the Annunciation. (This also
marks a difference between the New Eve and the Virgin
Mary. ) See Luke 1.28 and 31:

Hail, thou that highly favoured, the Lord is

art
with thee: blessed art thou among women....

And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and

bring forth a son, and shalt call his name
JESUS.

Mother announces:

'Hail, Evelyn, fortunate of men! You're

most
going to bring forth the Messiah of the
Antithesis! ' (p. 67)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 325
--I

out of doubleness can also be read as a symbol of the many

doublenesses which haunt Carter's work, and which this

thesis documents. On the one hand, the unborn child

represents hope for the future: it functions as a symbol

of rebirth and regeneration, and suggests the possibility

of an alternative consciousness outside patriarchal

convention. Schmidt and Sage, as I have shown, interpret

Eve's forthcoming child as a being outside convention

which cannot be defined since appropriate symbols have yet

to be generated. On the other hand, however, the baby's

non-existence--Eve's child's birth is not articulated

within the confines of the novel--forcefully reaffirms the

argument that nothing exists outside convention. The

existence of the child is suggested by Lilith, '"What if

Tristessa made pregnant? "' (p. 187), and accepted by

you

Eve, because Lilith's very language appears to be

perhaps

pregnant: 'Lilith, then, took it for granted that I was

pregnant; and under her solicitous chatter, the surface of

her speech, there was a ground-swell of necessity'

(pp. 187-88). But the birth of the baby, the birth of a

the hope of a future beyond

concrete representative of

be articulated inside
patriarchal convention, cannot

Carter's novel, and therefore does not exist as a textual

construct.

as a symbol of the
We can read Eve's pregnancy

of Carter's fiction,
doubleness of the reading experience
beyond itself, but
which continually suggests something
by that there is
also undermines this very notion showing
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 326
--I

only the novel, there are only constructions. We can also

read it as both a suggestion of a Utopian being outside

convention and yet also as the evidence that no such thing

exists. It is possible, as I suggested earlier, to read

The Passion itself as a representation of convention,

where the fictional and linguistic codes signify social

codes. The novel uses and exposes fictional codes as

codes at the same time as it exposes patriarchal

conventions as conventions. It continually suggests that

the story continues and Eve's baby will exist beyond the

textual confines, just as it suggests that utopian

alternatives, outside patriarchal convention, exist, and

yet it simultaneously demystifies these suggestions.

 CHAPTER 6

THE LIBERATION OF THE FEMALE SUBJECT? --II:

'NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS'

'And once the old world has turned on its axle

so that the new dawn can dawn, then, ah, then!
all the women will have wings, the same as I ...
The dolls' house doors will open, the brothels
will spill forth their prisoners, the cages,
gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in
every land, will let forth their inmates singing
together the dawn chorus of the new, the
transformed--'

'It's going to be more complicated than that,

interpolated Lizzie. 'This old witch sees
storms ahead, my girl. When I look to the
future, I see through i glass, darkly. You
improve your analysis, girl, and then we'll
discuss it. '

Angela Carter'

The future can only be anticipated in the form

of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks
absolutely with constituted normality and can
only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of
monstrosity. For that future world and for that
within it which will have put into question the
values and signs, word, and writing, for that
guides our future anterior, there is as
which
yet no exergue.

Jacques Derrida2

1 Lizzie in
An interchange between Fevvers and
Nights at the Circus, pp. 285-86.
2 Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri"Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976),
p. 5.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 328

Nights at the Circus is a celebratory and a visionary

novel. It can be read as a culmination the

of all of

experiments which I have described taking place in

Carter's earlier work, but it by functions

no means as a

conclusion. Rather, it serves both as a resume and as a

fresh beginning: it appears to to
offer answers some

questions but also generates many more of its own. Nights

at the Circus returns to many of the important theoretical

issues which Carter's earlier novels explore.

Chapter I offered an interpretation of Nights at the

Circus in terms of its effect on its readers and reading

conventions, asking an unanswerable, but productive,

question: who is in control, the reader or the text?

This final chapter presents a further reading of the same

novel, this time in the light of the experiments taking

place in Carter's earlier work, which I have documented.

In Chapter 2,1 described The Infernal Desire

Machines in terms of Jacques Derrida's model of

invagination; and in subsequent chapters I described how

much of Carter's work depends upon and exploits the play

between what is central and what marginal, what appears to

be inside, and what outside, convention. Nights at the

Circus is no exception: the circus ring can be

interpreted as a symbol of the vagina, functioning rather

like the carnival peep-show Exhibit 1 in The Infernal

Desire Machines, and the circus freaks and drop-outs who

The Liberation of the Female Subject? 329
--II

form the personnel of the ring are marginal in 'normal'

but in the 3
society central circus.

In Chapter 31 described how several novels

capitalise upon the superimposition of particular modes of

reading, often associated with nineteenth-century

'realist' and twentieth-century 'modernist' novels, in

order to expose the reading conventions which govern the

construction of character and identity, and which also

govern the way we read ourselves and the world. Nights at

the Circus appears almost to historicise this issue: the

novel is set at precisely the point of interaction of

these two centuries, and this chapter will reveal how it

self-consciously dramatises the different modes of reading

which have become associated with each century and how

they the construction of identity. Nights at the

affect

Circus illustrates, once again, the many ways in

also

which the recognition of convention as convention

readers' understanding of their own

challenges and changes

position.

In Chapter 4,1 discussed how The Passion exposes

ideology in order to demystify

codes governing patriarchal

the false universals which organise sexual politics,

the time a strategic politics, as

whilst at same adopting

if Woman beyond stereotypes. This

were a reality

describes the juxtaposition of a

paradoxical approach

3 Carter's the notion interest in

Another example of
is her introduction to a reissue of Memoirs of
of 'freaks'
by de la Mare (Oxford: Oxford University
a Midget Walter
Press, 1982).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 330
--II

demythologising and a celebratory reading of women's

difference which enacts the superimposition of important

'French' and 'American' feminist critical positions. As

this chapter will demonstrate, Fevvers in Nights at the

Circus symbolises this double reading of Woman.

Chapter 5 explores Carter's investigations into the

possibility of creating a liberated female subject, and

Nights at the Circus is obviously a continuation and

celebration of this theme. Fevvers appears to fulfil all

the expectations which some feminist critics have found

thwarted by Carter's previous novels. She is a symbol of

liberation, of change, and of positive femininity; and the

new departure for women which she represents is, in Rory

P. B. Turner's words, 'consecrated by the celebration of

the beginning of the 20th century. '4 The novel makes a

clear connection between Fevvers's potential for flight

and the new century: 'It is the final, waning, season of

the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety nine.

And Fevvers has all the eclat of a new era about to take

(p. 11). When Ma Nelson, the madame of the brothel in

off'

Fevvers Fevvers's wings for the first

which grows up, sees

time, the possibility of portraying Fevvers

she recognises

liberation in the new

as a triumphant symbol of women's

century:

'Oh, I think you must be the pure

my little one,
that just now is waiting in
child of the century

4
Rory 'Subjects and Symbols:
P. B. Turner,
in Nights at the Circus, ' in
Transformations of Identity
Folklore Forum, 20, Nos. 1/2 (1987), 39-60 (p. 58).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 331

the wings, the New Age in which no women will be

bound to the ground. ' And then she wept. That
night, we threw away the bow and arrow and I
posed, for the first time, as the Winged
Victory. (p. 25) 5

Several critics have readily accepted Fevvers as a

utopian New Woman figure. Gina Wisker describes her as a

'winged wonder, ' who perhaps embodies 'the new woman's

flight from the bondage of her roles. '6 Ricarda Schmidt

claims that 'Fevvers is the concrete manifestation of an

idea, the free woman, ' and that she is 'a child of the

dream of the future. '? Paulina Palmer states that 'the

most powerful image of liberation and transformation in

the novel is Fevvers herself and her magnificent wings. '8

5 Jeanne Duval, in the title of Black Venus,

story
is described in the same terms as Fevvers, but as if she
were Fevvers's negative. Where Fevvers is 'the new child
(Nights the Circus, p. 25), Duval is
of the century' at
described as 'the pure child of the colony. The
colony--white, imperious--had fathered her' (Black Venus,
is the Cockney Venus, Jeanne Duval, the
p. 17). Fevvers
Black Venus. Fevvers is a bird woman and trapeze artist,
Jeanne is described as 'the sooty albatross, ' one of
and
'the live in the heart of the
wonderful aerielistes who
'dare death the high trapeze' (Black
storm' and who upon
Fevvers is 'Helen of the High Wire'
Venus, pp. 18-19).
(Nights Circus, 7), Jeanne has 'black Helen's
at the p. and
lips' (Black Venus, 15). Fevvers is a New Eve figure
p.
but is described 'The custard-apple of her
Jeanne as
Eden this forlorn Eve, bit' (Black Venus,
stinking she,
P. 9).
6 Women and Werewolves: How do
Gina Wisker, 'Winged
Carter, ' in Ideas and Production: A
we read Angela
Ideas, Issue 4: Poetics (1986),
Journal in the History of
87-98 (p. 94).

7 Subject in
Ricarda Schmidt, 'The Journey of the
' in Textual Practice, 3, No. 1
Angela Carter's fiction,
(Spring 1989), 56-75 (pp. 71 and 68 respectively).

8 'From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird

Paulina Palmer,
Carter's Magic Flight, ' in Women Reading
Woman: Angela
by Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester,
Women's Writing, edited
1987), pp. 177-205 (p. 199).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 332

Palmer, as I have already made clear in previous chapters,

is disturbed by what she feels are 'distorted'

femininity in 9
representations of Carter's pre-1978 work;

Nights at the Circus, however, makes up for the

deficiencies she found in The Passion and its

predecessors. Pa Lmer claims that Carter's more recent

fiction combines, 'in a manner unprecedented in Carter's

work, an analysis of the oppressive nature of patriarchal

structures with a treatment of themes relating to psychic

change and female specificity' ('From "Coded Mannequin, "'

p. 195).

Palmer opens her article by quoting an interchange

between Fevvers and Lizzie which occurs toward the end of

Nights at the Circus, and which I have used as an epigraph

to this chapter. Fevvers, she claims, looks forward to a

time 'all the will have wings' (Nights at the

when women

Circus, p. 285), but Fevvers's 'flight of fancy remains

incomplete, her are sharply interrupted by a

since words

by her foster mother Lizzie. ' This

cynical comment voiced

quotation, Palmer argues 'illustrates a key area of

tension in Carter's by juxtaposing two

writing,

9 Palmer refers to, in

The 'post-1978' work which
Bird Woman, ' includes only The
'From "Coded Mannequin" to
the Circus. Of the earlier
Bloody Chamber and Nights at
texts published prior to
fiction, Palmer writes, 'The she
1978 were in my opinion, by an element of
marred,
distortion. This led to read them in the manner
me
the Pierre Macherey, very conscious
associated with critic
"silences"' (p. 180)" She
of "absences", "omissions" and
is A Theory of Literary Produc-
referring to Macherey's
Wall (London: Routledge &
tion, translated by Geoffrey
Kegan Paul, 1978).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 333
--II

antithetical impulses which inform it' ('From "Coded

Mannequin, "' p. 179). The tension, then, is between what

Palmer describes as newly introduced 'celebratory' and

'utopian' elements, of which Fevvers is the embodiment,

and the demythologising processes which she feels dominate

Carter's earlier novels. Palmer's main concern in the

article is to applaud what she sees as these new elements

of celebration. She praises the imagery of liberation and

rebirth connected with Fevvers, and stresses how this

enables 'the opening up of areas of identity that were

closed and the formation of alternative structures,

...

psychic and social' ('From "Coded Mannequin, "' p. 182).

She also comments upon the novel's use of 'magic realism'

in order to express the 'liberating' emotions of pleasure

and wonder. She commends the new emphasis which this

novel places upon productive and positive relationships

between women and within communities of women,

particularly Fevvers and Lizzie, Mignon's lesbian

relationship with the Princess, and 'the emergence of a

female counter-culture' ('From "Coded Mannequin, "' p. 180)

the escape from Countess P's

celebrated when women who

head into the tundra to found their own

penitentiary off

female Palmer the challenges to

utopia. stresses

by these possibilities for both

patriarchal society posed

personal and universal change.

documents the two

However, while she very usefully

'antithetical impulses' of demythologising and celebration

in Nights the does not--except for her

at Circus, she
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 334
--II

opening example of Fevvers's and Lizzie's

conversation--document their interaction, maintaining

instead that each 'impulse' 'is of interest in its own

right. ' Her article classifies Carter's pre-1978 fiction

as 'analytic' and 'demythologising, ' and the post-1987

fiction as 'celebratory' ('From "Coded Mannequin, "' p. 179

and pp. 179-80 10 What this

respectively). approach points
towards, but fails to stress, is the extraordinary way in

which these two contradictory 'impulses' in Nights at the

Circus exist in juxtaposition: in this novel, nearly all

moments of celebration are accompanied by their

demythologising complement. For example, the novel

obviously does celebrate the liberation of the women

murderers, who set out to make a completely new start for

themselves outside convention: 'The white world around

them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh paper on

which they could inscribe whatever future they wished'

(p. 218). It also, however, demythologises this

description of the female separatist utopia in the tundra,

as indeed, it criticises all the utopian possibilities

which it It is clear that though the women do

posits.

escape from Countess P's, their freedom is limited: they

10 'The the Subject, ' Ricarda Schmidt

In Journey of
draws distinction between Nights at the Circus
a similar
and Carter's earlier fiction:

In Circus Carter switches from the analysis of

i. e. from the
the formation of the subject,
deconstruction of the subject as good and
natural, to the construction of a fantastic
subject, the free woman. (p. 73)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 335
--II

cannot escape history and are held by their own past

experiences. The women long for their children (p. 218),

but have no choice but to remain outside civilization

because they are outside the law. Paradoxically, the

novel also shows that the women cannot exist totally

outside convention, since they are not self-sufficient;

the comic description of their dilemma also deflates and

denies the seriousness of the separatist utopian

possibility. For example, the women have to ask the

escaped convict (their male counterpart) to 'deliver 'em

up a pint or two of sperm to impregnate such of them

...

as were of child-bearing age and so ensure the survival of

little free (p. 240). 11 To cap

this republic of women'

this, there are Lizzie's obstreperous comments, 'What'll

they do with the boy babies? Feed 'em to the polar bears?

To the female polar bears? ' (pp. 240-41). The novel's

of this separatist option has had

paradoxical presentation

a winning on some reviewers who would not be

effect

sympathetic, I suspect, to Palmer's position. Amy E.

Schwartz that Nights at the Circus manages 'to

maintains

bypass the didacticism the urgent tone that tended to

and

the first of serious feminist fiction'

mar so much of wave

(New Republic, May 1985, pp. 38-41 (p. 38)), and valentine

Cunningham writes:

11
Nothing like the 'parthenogenesis archetype' put
(p. 68), or portrayed in
forward by Mother in The Passion
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (London: The Women's
Press, 1979), where these women might magically reproduce
themselves, is suggested in this novel.
even remotely
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 336
--II

This big, superlatively imagined be

novel may an
extravaganza, but it refuses to be as
extravagantly hostile to men's doings and
tellings as some of the less well-tempered
women's books nowadays are. (Observer, 30
September 1984, p. 20)

It is the disturbing coexistence the

of

demythologising with the celebratory, one the

of many

powerful juxtapositions in Carter's work, which

facilitates what at first to be impossible. 12

appears

Nights at the Circus explores the constitution of the

subject in relation to the notion of free womanhood

(Schmidt, 'The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 56); more

specifically, it presents a simultaneous breakdown of the

notion of identity and yet also the creation of an

extraordinary woman with wings (who is, of course, herself

concerned with the question of her own existence). Clare

Hanson describes how Fevvers represents an image of the

inconceivable. She writes, 'It is almost impossible to

find/imagine an image of women which escapes [the]

masculine/feminine, positive/negative "violent hierarchy. "

Perhaps Carter herself achieves this with Fevvers in

12 Similarly, Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of

Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), describes
Carter's short story 'Black Venus' in terms of the
juxtaposition of two discourses--'of complicity and
challenge'--which and clash, and result in the
meet
representation 'the feminist politicization of desire'
of
(p. 149). 'Carter's text, ' Hutcheon writes,

consistently contrasts the language of

Baudelairean decadent male eroticism with the
stark social reality of Jeanne Duval's position
kept woman.... The
as a colonial, a black, and a
text is interweaving of the discourses
a complex
of desire of the erotic and the
and politics,
analytic, of the male and female. (pp. 145-46)
The Liberation of the Female Subiect? --II 337

Nights at the Circus. '13 Hanson is alluding to the end of

'Women's Time, ' in which Kristeva argues for a 'de-

dramatization of the "fight to the death"' between the

sexes, in order to shift the focus of the struggle to the

place of 'maximum intransigence, in other words, in

personal and sexual identity itself. '14 This, I would

argue, is exactly what Carter does in Nights at the

Circus: the novel takes the focus away from binary gender

opposition and concentrates on identity itself. It is

Fevvers's own contradictory identity which empowers her

with the capacity for liberation and change which her

critics, both inside-the world of the novel and outside

the novel, so admire.

Fevvers, then, can be read as the New Woman figure

it seems, could not be articulated in Carter's

which,

fiction. Indeed, Ricarda Schmidt offers the very

earlier

intriguing that Nights at the Circus be read as

suggestion

a continuation of The Passion in which the positive

possibilities suggested at the end of the earlier novel

to fruition: Fevvers might be read as Eve's awaited

come

child, the New Messiah and the New Eve:

Circus a is logical sequel to The

Nights at the
in a way, the heroine
Passion of New Eve, since,
is Eve's daughter: Fevvers is the new
Fevvers

13 'Each Other: Images of Otherness

Clare Hanson,
in the Lessing, Jean Rhys and
Short Fiction of Doris
Short Story in English,
Angela Carter, ' in Journal of the
10 (Spring 1988), 67-82 (p. 82).

14 'Women's Time, ' in Signs: The

Julia Kristeva,
Society, 7, No. 1 (1981),
Journal of Women in Culture and
13-35 (p. 34).
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ect? 338
--II

symbol of femininity, the contribution to

evolution Eve had expected her child to be. She
is the archaeopteryx Eve had envisaged, that
mystical being, 'composed of the contradictory
elements of air and earth (Eve, p. 185). ' ('The
Journey of the Subject, ' p. 67)

Schmidt's suggestion could also be supported by a list of

motifs which the two novels share. For example, Lizzie

tells Fevvers, 'You are Year One' (Nights at the Circus,

p. 198), and Eve wonders if the birth of the child which

Mother intends her to have will mark 'Year One' (The

Passion, p. 79). Also, near the end of The Passion:

'Somebody discovered a can of red paint in a wrecked

hardware store and effortfully lettered on a remaining

the legend: YEAR ONE' (p. 172). 15 As I at the

wall argued

end of Chapter 5, Eve's baby is conceived out of

doubleness, and Fevvers, as this chapter will describe,

represents doubleness incarnate: she is the 'Queen of

ambiguities' (p. 81); she appears to be both fact and

fiction; and she combines elements of both earth and air:

Boozy, bawdy, demotically outspoken, and

mythically endowed with a pair of great wings
for flights above and out of the ordinary.
(Valentine Cunningham, Observer, 30 September
1984, p. 20)

partly a feminist fantasy, partly a robust

... ' (John Mellors,
and earthy 'Cockney Venus.
Listener, 11 October 1984, p. 30)

15 from the Front Line, ' in On Gender and

In 'Notes
by Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora,
Writing, edited
identifies a period in the late
1983), pp. 69-77, C arter
One, ' 'all that was holy
1960's which 'felt like Year when
(p. 70).
was in the process of being profaned'
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 339
--II

Her wings suggest that she is either a fairy or an angel,

but the novels makes it clear that she is both too robust

and too sexy to be either of these.

As I have shown throughout this thesis, all of

Carter's work is concerned with the notion of change, but

it is also deeply concerned with convention. By exposing

and exploiting certain elements of patriarchal ideology,

Carter's work shows again and again that conventions need

to be acknowledged as conventions, rather than as

universal truths, in order both to register that change is

indeed possible and to enact this change. Thus, Carter's

work is not concerned to create a fictional utopian world

totally outside of ideology, but to make a space for

change to happen, by exploiting the codes of thought that

we have. It is, of course, this space which my whole

thesis attempts to illuminate. At one point in the novel

Lizzie lectures the escaped convict:

'What have to contend with, here, my boy, is

we
the long shadow of the past historic that
...
forged the institutions which create the human
nature of the present in the first place.

'It's the human "soul" that must be forged

not
but the itself
on the anvil of history anvil
be changed in order to change humanity.
must
Then if not "perfection", then
we might see,
better, not to raise to
something a little or,
false hopes, little less bad. ' (p. 240)ý6
many a

Carter's work, which is

The passage reflects all of

in exploiting the 'past

engaged reinterpreting and

historic' in order to demythologise patriarchal

16 to be conducted in the
Lizzie's analysis appears
light of a knowledge of formal French grammar.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 340
--II

'institutions which create the human nature of the

present, ' to create a vision of social change, and to

question how this 17

social change might come about.

Leading on from this argument, the logical way to

read Fevvers is not as a utopian New Woman figure of the

future, who is outside convention, representing a totally

new order of things (as Palmer, Schmidt and many reviewers

suggest), but to read Nights at the Circus, for all its

presentation of a marvellous woman with wings, as exerting

pressure on the here and now. Fevvers can be interpreted

as everywoman, or what women could be in the 20th

18 Indeed, it is ironic that at

century. a novel written

the end of the 20th century should depict a vision of

women's liberation at the end of the 19th century, and

that this vision should still be interpreted by so many

critics as a vision of the future.

I would like to claim that Fevvers can be read as a

symbol of the liberatory reading space that this whole

thesis is attempting to describe. All the adjectives

which I have used to describe the reading space could also

be used to describe Fevvers. Both are ungraspable: they

cannot be fixed, they are a combination of opposites,

17 ' Turner claims that by

In 'Subjects and Symbols,
'scapegoating historic, ' which, he claims, is
the past
by dance themselves into
represented the clowns who
oblivion, 'Carter is opening up a space for
of human nature and
reinterpretation, and a reorientation
human relationships' (pp. 52-53).

18 Clare Hanson, in 'Each other, ' writing about

'Black that 'Jeanne serves for
Venus, ' similarly claims
Carter as an image of all women' (p. 78).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 341
--II

located on the borderline between one state and another.

Fevvers's slogan reads 'Is she fact or is she fiction? '

(p. 7), but this could extend to, is she inside or outside

convention? is she central or marginal? is she a fraud or

a freak? is she real or supernatural? is she believable or

incredible? Once again, this duality and undecidability

is what makes her, like the liberatory reading space,

special; any attempt to tie her down to either side of any

of these definitions (and many attempts are made within

the world of the novel) takes away her liberatory power.

Fevvers's paradoxical nature is her strength: she cannot

be proved false because there is nothing graspable about

Fevvers to refute. She is both completely new and unique

and yet also rooted in convention.

The remainder of this final chapter will be in three

sections, all of which will show how Nights at the Circus

can be read as a culmination of the experiments carried

out in Carter's earlier work which uses convention in

order to project a vision of change. Fevvers is a vision

of the possibility of change. She represents a challenge

to interpretation, both in terms of the possibility of her

very existence, and her symbolic value as a woman. The

first section will be concerned with gender, and

specifically a reading of the significance of Fevvers's

body her woman; the second

and status as a representative

section will attempt to trace Fevvers's origins, examine

the identity how she symbolises the

notion of and show

liberatory I have been attempting to

reading space which
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 342

define; and finally the third section will return once

more to the position of the reader Carter's
of work.

II

In order to earn a living, might not a genuine

bird-woman--in the implausible event that such a
thing existed--have to pretend she was an
artificial one?

He smiled to himself at the paradox: in a

secular age, an authentic miracle must purport
to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the
world. (p. 17)

Near the beginning of her long autobiographical

narrative, Fevvers tells Walser how she hesitated to take

her first flight from the roof of Ma Nelson's brothel,

because she realised that the proof that her wings were

'real' would place her totally outside convention:

'I feared a wound not of the body but the soul,

sir, an irreconcilable division between myself
and the rest of mankind.

'I feared the proof of my own singularity. '

(p. 34)

It is Fevvers's body, her wings and her ability to fly,

which signifies her Otherness, that is, her difference

from the rest humanity. This section will suggest that

of

Fevvers's the of her Otherness, can be

wings, sign

interpreted as an exaggerated sign of her difference as a

woman, her a visible metaphor for

where wings represent

another which cannot be seen.

part of woman's anatomy

According to this argument, then, Fevvers's wings

The Liberation of the Female Subject? 343
--II

represent what cannot be completely subsumed within

patriarchal ideology: the difference of bodies

womens'

and womens' sexuality. Importantly, in this novel, it is

Fevvers's body and not her political actions which mark

her as a representative for all women. (Typically, Carter

does build into the narrative a careful and precise web of

political and historical specificity which is an integral,

but supportive rather than controlling, part of the

19)
plot.

As I have outlined in the previous chapter, the body

is a central and controversial issue in feminist

criticism, and by focusing so clearly on Fevvers's body as

the sign of her difference Carter is courting an

essentialist convention which locates women's difference

in biology. Carter is also exposing, by exaggerating, the

stereotypical definition of woman as object of the male

gaze, in portraying Fevvers as a freak and a spectacle.

It is as if Carter is saying, if women's bodies are what

them different, let us have a body that is really

makes

different!

19 The novel has historical setting and

a specific
is details from turn of the century feminist
riddled with
The Ma Nelson's brothel, for example,
concerns. women at
are described as suffragists; Lizzie, the novel suggests,
to attending the 'Godwin and Wollstonecraft
was accustomed
Debating Society' in Whitechapel (p. 241). Throughout the
Lizzie Fevvers are involved in some mysterious
novel, and
include spying in Russia, for
political activities which
they by 'a spry little gent with a
which were recruited
'tache [Lizzie] in the of the British
met reading-room
Museum' (p. 292). (The pun on spy/spry makes the
connection obvious. )
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 344
--II

Fevvers's body can be interpreted as the site of her,

and all women's, doubleness. Her body is always conceived

of in contradictory terms; at once celebrated for its

uniqueness, as totally outside convention, but also

interpreted in conventional terms. Stereotypically, women

in patriarchal society are both contained and yet exceed

this containment because of their Otherness; that is,

women are both dominated and feared, regarded both as

slaves to convention and as close to nature. Nights at

the Circus exploits these stereotypes to suggest that

Fevvers and all the women she represents are empowered

precisely because they operate on the boundary between the

outside and the inside of convention. Typically, Fevvers

describes her body in both celebratory and demythologising

terms: she recognises it as 'the abode of limitless

freedom, ' and yet in the same sentence admits that this

same body is subject to 'the constraints the world

imposes' (p. 41). 20 To focus and to celebrate, the

on,

doubleness Fevvers's body, this novel does, is to

of as

to the codes which define

expose and exploit patriarchal

it is to celebrate the doubleness of

what women are; also

all they are defined in patriarchal society and

women as

this definition invests

to exploit the power with which

them. What follows is a series of examples which account

20 in 'From "Coded Mannequin, "' p. 180,

Both Palmer
the Subject, ' p. 68, use the
and Schmidt in 'The Journey of
to describe Fevvers as a New
first part of this quotation
Woman, but both fail to register the qualifying message
the rest of the sentence promotes.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 345
--II

for how and why Fevvers exploits conventions and carefully

constructs her self in terms of contradictions.

First, as I described in the previous chapter, women

have conventionally been defined in terms of polarities,

for example Madonna or Whore, Angel or Monster, Housewife

and Witch. In each of these examples one pole--'Whore, '

'Monster, ' and 'Witch'--suggest the fear of women as

Other, as not easily containable within convention (and

therefore powerful). Nights at the Circus 'uses' these

stereotypical definitions of women, but also 'abuses' them

through excess, by portraying a figure who appears to

conform simultaneously to both polarities of each

stereotype. At Ma Nelson's, for example, Fevvers is known

as the 'Virgin Whore' (p. 55), and her body is interpreted

both divine Ma Nelson interprets it

as and as monstrous:

as celestial--'To think we've entertained an angel

' (p. 25)21--and this same 'divine' body is

unawares! yet

also subject to a more 'earthly (and earthy)'22

21
See Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez's short story, 'The
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' in Collected Stories
1984), pp. 203-10. The old man
(New York: Harper and Row, to be
in this is thought by many an
with wings story, who
because of his
angel, is also portrayed as monstrous
this story is that the
ordinariness. Part of the power of
convention. The
old man cannot be placed within existing
is but he cannot
veracity of his wings never questioned
because he is so
quite be accepted as supernatural
He convalesces in the
unremarkable in every other way.
if he bird with a broken wing a
chicken coop, as were a
his feathers have
child had rescued, and flies away when
does not seem to
regrown. The gender of Mdrquez's angel
be of major as it is in Carter's novel.
significance,
22 Journey of the Subject, ' p. 67;
Schmidt, in 'The
she describe Fevvers as 'big, vulgar,
goes on to
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 346

interpretation which focuses her

on ugliness, and her

physical ungainliness:

That grubby dressing-gown, horribly caked with

greasepaint round the neck.. when Lizzie lifted
.
up the armful of hair, you could see, under the
splitting, rancid silk, her humps, her lumps,
big as if she bore a bosom fore her
and aft,
conspicuous deformity, the twin hills of the
growth she had put away for those hours she must
spend in daylight or lamplight, out of the
spotlight. So, on the street, at the soiree, at
lunch in expensive restaurants with dukes,
princes, captains of industry and punters of
like kidney, she was always the cripple, even if
she always drew the eye and people stood on
chairs to see. (p. 19)

What is essential here is that Fevvers maintain the

paradox. Her power lies in the fact that she is both and

yet neither Madonna and Whore, Angel and Monster, and this

is recognised and discussed within the world of the novel.

When Fevvers's competitors, the high-wire dancers known as

the Charivaris, sabotage her band rehearsal by sawing

through the trapeze rope, she is put into a dangerous

situation. The danger is similar to that which Fevvers

describes when relating the story of her first-ever flight

from the roof of Ma Nelson's brothel. The first flight

proved to Fevvers her difference from the rest of

humanity; a flight in the circus ring, without the

suggestion that she might be cheating, would prove her

singularity publically, and so mark her definitively as a

freak. Walser realises this:

If she were indeed a lusus naturae, a prodigy,

then--she was no longer a wonder.

gluttonous, for at the same time she has

greedy money--but
a pair of splendid wings. '
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 347
--II

She would no longer be an extraordinary woman,

no more the Greatest Aerialiste in the world
but--a freak. Marvellous, indeed, but a
marvellous monster, an exemplary being denied
the human privilege of flesh and blood, always
the object of the observer, never the subject of
sympathy, an alien creature forever estranged.

She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he

thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic
woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none.

As an anomaly, she would become again, as she

once had been, an exhibit in a museum of
curiosities. But what would she become, if she
continued to be a woman? (p. 161)

Schmidt interprets this passage as Walser's notion of

Fevvers as a symbol of New Woman:

First, the new symbol must show woman as part of

humanity, not raise her above it or place her
below it. Second, it must ensure that woman
does not have the status of an object but of a
subject. Third, it must appreciate woman's
difference sympathetically instead of making it
a reason for estrangement. Fourth, the symbolic
meaning of woman remains open. ('The Journey of
the Subject, ' p. 70)

Schmidt's last two points are accurate, but the first two

tell only half the story. Walser realizes that Fevvers's

power lies in the fact that she remains a paradox, and to

do this remain both subject and object, both

she must

Angel/Monster (at once above and below 'humanity'), and

human.

Second, Nights the Circus exploits the notion that

at

that is, which does not conform to

anything new, anything
23
existing (patriarchal) codes, is labelled monstrous.

23 is the exploration into

This a continuation of
I have documented in
the question 'What is Woman? ' which
relation to other in Chapter 4.
novels
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 348

Catherine Belsey claims that revolutionary women have

necessarily been interpreted as monsters or demons, since

to take on patriarchy effectively is also to transgress
the boundaries of what is defined in patriarchal

convention as a woman. Using both historical literary

and

examples, Belsey describes how radical in the

women

seventeenth century were labelled (and burned) as witches

freaks. 24
and Anne Cranny-Francis describes how

mainstream nineteenth-century literature and its

critics were equally gender-biased, with the
female emancipist or feminist activist of the
late nineteenth century singled out for
especially virulent condemnation. The 'New
Woman', as she was know, was characterised as
some kind of sexless, undersexed, or oversexed
25
monster.

Nights at the Circus presents Fevvers as a concretisation

of this notion of revolutionary, or 'New Woman, ' though,

once again, her power lies in the paradox that she might

Clare Hanson, in 'Each Other, ' describes Jeanne

Duval, from 'Black Venus, ' as a monstrous figure: she
writes:

Jeanne Duval offers an extreme image of the

woman as other--she is trebly unknown to
Baudelaire as a black woman from another
continent She is also of course obscurely
... the
threatening, associated with Eve and with
woman of immense height. '
monstrous-feminine--'a
She is explicitly tarred with the misogynist
term 'witch' traditionally used by men to
distance themselves from the latent (unknown,
If woman is unknown,
again) power of women ...
the is always feared. (pp. 78-79)
unknown
24 The Subject of Tragedy:
Catherine Belsey,
Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London:
Methuen, 1985), p. 164-191.
25 Feminist Fiction: Feminist
Anne Cranny-Francis,
Uses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990),
of Generic Fiction
PA
.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 349

be a fraud. If she reveals that the monster label is

warranted by the facts then she loses her potency.

Lizzie, by contrast, is a more traditional revolutionary:
her 'habit of lecturing the [brothel] clients on the white

slave trade, the rights and wrongs of women, universal

suffrage, as well as the Irish question, the Indian

question, republicanism, anti-clericalism, syndicalism and

the abolition of the House of Lords' (p. 292) makes her an

'inconvenient harlot' (p. 292), and also earns her the

title of 'Witch. '26

Importantly, the very labels 'Monster, ' 'Witch, ' and

'Angel, ' are, in themselves, paradoxical, as Catherine

Belsey writes:

The demonisation of women who subvert the

meaning of femininity is contradictory in its
implications. It places them beyond meaning,
beyond the limits of what is intelligible. At
the same time it endows them with a
(supernatural) power which is precisely the
project of patriarchy to deny. (The Subject of
Tragedy, p. 185)

The label 'Monster, ' like the labels 'Woman' or 'Other, '

whilst suggesting definition, also fails to define. The

term 'Monster' appears to contain a disruption and yet the

26 in Black Venus, p. 17, is also

Jeanne Duval,
described ' Annabel in Love takes
as 'witchy. And when
over from her husband Lee, she also takes on the
control
role of witch:

She guessed the institution of a new order of

things in which she was an active force rather
than the mercy of every wind that
an object at
blew; bewitched, she became herself a
no longer
witch (p. 77).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 350
--II

disruption is 27
uncontainable. Ironically, the

paradoxical significance of the label 'Monster, ' when

applied to revolutionary women, only serves to emphasise

their similarity with all women: stereotypically, both

are contained and yet exceed containment in patriarchal

society. This leads to the logical conclusion, according

to patriarchal convention, that all women are potential

monsters (with supernatural power), and that therefore

they are all potential revolutionaries.

Third, Nights at the Circus dramatizes the paradox

described by Belsey's last sentence in the above

quotation: it both exposes the idea that women have

supernatural power as a patriarchal construct, but at the

same time exploits it to the full. For example,

Rosencreutz calls Fevvers 'Azrael, the Angel of Death,

'the bright angel who will release him from the material,

the winged spirit of universal springtime' (p. 79); and he

wishes to use her in a ritual human sacrifice to give

himself everlasting life. As a symbolic Angel or goddess,

Fevvers is paradoxical, that is,

of course, necessarily

both and it is the power

contained and yet uncontainable,

this doubleness Rosencreutz hopes to tap into.

of which

He calls her "'Queen goddess of in-between

of ambiguities,

being borderline species"' (p. 81).

states, on the of

27 in 'Subjects and Symbols, '

Rory P. B. Turner,
accounts for Fevvers doubleness in terms of Bakhtin's
notion of the grotesque (in which the notion of
He writes: 'She is grotesque,
monstrosity plays a part).
uncontained and uncontainable. ' (p. 48)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 351

Ironically, of course, it is he has

who endowed Fevvers

with the life-giving potential he hopes to harness. The

notion of her supernatural power is his own construction,

just as the 'unnatural' power to
attributed non-conformist

women is a patriarchal construct.

Angela Carter is not alone in choosing to expose and

exploit the possibilities for liberation inherent in the

definition of non-conformist women as 'monsters. ' This is

an important theme which has recently been explored by

several contemporary British women writers who are

concerned with creating revolutionary women figures, and

who, like Carter, exploit the specificity of women's

bodies. A brief description of two examples--Fay Weldon's

The Lives and Loves of a She Devil28, which was published

the year before Carter's novel, and Jeanette Winterson's

Sexing the Cherry, 29

which was published six years

later--will help contextualise the experiments taking

in 30 Ruth in Weldon's novel

place Nights at the Circus.

28 Fay Weldon, The Life Loves of a She Devil

and
(1983) (London: Coronet, 1984).
29 Sexing the Cherry (1989)
Jeanette Winterson,
(London: Vintage, 1990).

30 is Sian Hayton's Cells of

Another recent example
Knowledge (Edinburgh: Polygon Press, 1989), set in tenth
century Scotland. Itýdescribes the confrontation of the
Church daughter borrowed from
and Marighal, a giant's
Celtic folklore. When Marighal reveals her extraordinary
strength to the monks, by benignly helping them shift some
her difference, and is ostracised.
rocks, she also reveals
The novel tells her through the story of the monks
story
to destroy the threat which her
who hunt her down in order
specialness poses to the patriarchal order.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 352
--II

is labelled by her husband, Bobbo, 'she-devil'

as a (p. 42)

partly because she stands in the way his love

of affair

with the angelic-looking Mary Fisher, but because

also she
is large and ugly--she describes herself 'six foot two
as
inches tall, which is fine for but for
a man not a woman

and [has] one of those jutting jaws which tall, dark

...

women often have, and eyes sunk rather far back into [her]

face, and a hooked nose' (p. 9). Ruth responds to Bobbo's

name calling by assuming the role of she-devil and

literalising the supernatural power with which his label

invests her in order to master him and gain her revenge

(p. 43). Winterson's most recent, brilliant, novel also

makes use of the paradoxical convention of labelling

revolutionary woman as monstrous. She creates a

seventeenth-century revolutionary, the apparently

'hideous' and enormous Dog-Woman (who at one point

outweighs an elephant (pp. 24-25)). She also portrays a

twentieth-century counterpart to Dog-Woman, a nameless

woman who is camping on the banks of the polluted River

Thames protesting about mercury levels. This woman sees

her Otherness (both as a woman and as a revolutionary

woman) in monstrous terms as if she were a reincarnation

of Dog-Woman: 'I am a woman going mad. I am a woman

hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant'

The Eskimo 'Sermerssuaq, ' which Carter has

story,
chosen to act as an epigraph for The Virago Book of Fairy
Stories tells and larger than life
of a similarly powerful
woman.
The Liberation of the Female Subject?
--II 353

(p. 121). She also, like Fevvers in Nights at the Circus,

imagines a time when all women will not be earth-bound:
So I learned to be alone in
and to take pleasure
the dark where no one could see me and where I
could look at the stars and invent a world where
there was no gravity, no holding force. (p. 124)

In many ways Fevvers can be thought of as a concrete

symbol of the world that Winterson's twentieth-century,

nameless, heroine imagines as a child. This has

woman
imagined breaking out, indeed, hatching out, of

patriarchal confines--'I was a monster in a carpeted egg'

(p. 124) --by growing enormous and bursting out of the walls

of her family's house. She also describes escaping

marginalisation by growing too large for conventional

definition:

I wasn't fat because I was greedy; I hardly ate

at all. I was fat because I wanted to be bigger
than all the things that were bigger than me.
All the things that had power over me. It was a
battle I intended to win.

Itseems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who

isignored and overlooked will expand to the
point where they have to be noticed, eý? n if the
noticing is fear and disgust. (p. 124)

This notion of escape, however, is itself marginalized,

narrated in retrospect and with irony, as a childhood

recollection. We know, from Dog-Woman's experience, that

to be larger than life, to be noticed with 'fear and

disgust, ' is also to be marginalized as monstrous.

31 is calling upon the notion

Like Carter, Winterson
of the grotesque, and Winterson makes explicit reference
to her source: is no Rabelaisian dimension for
'But there
"the
rage' (Sexing Cherry, p. 124).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 354

Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, like Weldon's Ruth,

and Winterson's Dog-Woman and her twentieth-century

counterpart (as she imagines herself), is depicted as

larger than life, and as a freak. All the large in
women
these three novels are described as more than for
a match

the men in their lives, and the size and strength are

obviously reasons for their definition as monsters. All

three of these women, however, turn this stereotype around

and make it work for themselves: they can also be

interpreted as concrete examples of the threat patriarchal

society feels large or fat women pose to the status quo, a

threat these to 32
which women put positive use. Both of

the women in Winterson's novel are ostracised from society

because of the threat their difference poses to the status

quo, and their isolation renders them relatively harmless.

Fevvers, however, is an emancipatory figure whose power is

embodied in her doubleness. She is different from other

women but also the same; she may be huge, for example, but

she is shamelessly sexy. Once again, by maintaining the

paradox, Fevvers escapes marginalisation and retains the

power of her Otherness. Fevvers, like the other heroines

described here, the inherent in the label

exploits paradox

'monster, ' but, Ruth, who uses what might be

unlike

interpreted as supernatural power (complete self-control,

determination, self-confidence, ability to withstand great

physical pain) in order to erase her very monstrousness

32 to by John Waters'
This is an issue taken extreme
famous 'Divine' films.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 355
--II

and to conform completely to the patriarchal definition of

what woman 'should be, '33 or Dog-Woman and her

counterpart, whose social isolation only reinforces the

notion of their difference, Fevvers is an advertisement

for all women to become, or recognise themselves as,

'Monsters. '

Nights at the Circus emphasises Fevvers's status as a

representative of all women by making a clear connection

between the two things which signal Fevvers's Otherness,

her wings and her female genitalia. The novel dramatizes

how both wings and genitals inspire the Monster label,

that is, are both contained and yet uncontainable in

patriarchal terms, and how this inherent doubleness can be

used to either imprison or liberate. Fevvers's

imprisonment at Madame Schreck's, for example, illustrates

how women can be confined by the patriarchal definition of

their bodies. Female genitalia have conventionally been

interpreted as a monstrous Otherness (which Carter has

otherwise, and frequently, portrayed as vagina dentalis,

see Chapter 2); Rosencreutz describes their significance

to Fevvers:

'Yoni, Hindu, the

in female
the part,
of course,
or absence, or atrocious hole, or dreadful
the Abyss, Down Below, the vortex that
chasm,
dreadfully down, down, down,
sucks everything
where Terror rules... ' (p. 77)

33 in Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She

Ruth
Devil, explains to her doctor: 'III have tried many ways
body, and the world into
of fitting myself to my original
which I born, have failed Since I cannot
was and ...
change them, I will change myself"' (p. 203).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 356
--II

Madame Schreck's wine cellar, the 'women

where monsters'

are imprisoned and to which men drawn in both

are terror

and fascination, is a concrete symbol the

of conventional

notion of female genitalia. The cellar is known

also as
the 'Abyss' or 'Down Below' (p. 61), and Fevvers announces

the obvious connection:

'He's so appalled at the notion of the orifice

that the poor old sod mumbles and whimpers
himself to a halt, though he's no stranger to
the Abyss, himself, used to come every Sunday,
just to convince himself it was as 'orrible as
he'd always thought. ' (p. 77)

In the world of Nights at the Circus, then, women who are

different (who do not conform to convention) are literally

imprisoned within a symbol of their difference as women.

At the same time, however, the novel makes it clear that

the notion of their difference is a matter of

interpretation, and is a construct of patriarchal society:

'There was no terror in the house our customers did not

bring with them' (p. 62).

Fevvers prophetic speech, which I have used as an

epigraph, can now be interpreted: '"And once the old

world has turned on its axle so that the new dawn can

dawn, then, ah, then! all the women will have wings, the

same as I'll (p. 285). Nights at the Circus, like The

Passion, is argument based on the

courting an essentialist

specificity bodies in order to show that this

of women's

definition Woman is By the end of the

of a construction.

novel it is not important whether Fevvers has genuine

the interpretation of her wings, the

wings or not, since
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 357
--II

sign of her difference as a woman, has The

changed.

speech refers to a time when all women can acknowledge

their capacity for liberation: when all women understand

that their 'difference' is a product of patriarchy,

Fevvers claims, they will be able to use this knowledge in

order to escape. She suggests the need to take hold of

the conventional notion of difference and exploit it to

the full in order to subvert it.

Nights at the Circus charts Fevvers's progress

through patriarchal society showing the power of her self-

confident exploitation of convention in the way she

escapes definition. Just as patriarchal society seeks to

define what woman is in order to master and control, so

all of the men in Fevvers's life try to grasp hold of her

and define her in their own terms in order to assimilate

her into their own system of understanding. Fevvers's

wings, her genitals, and her story, are all presented as

desirable commodities which men wish to master and

control, but which remain out of reach. Fevvers's wings,

for example, the sign of her difference, are the reason

why so many attempt to trap her, but these same wings

enable Fevvers to 'transcend[] the symbols that men create

to contain her' (Turner, 'Subjects and Symbols, ' p. 46).

Her to fixed definition is represented by

ability escape

her flights from those who seek to limit her to a symbolic

aspect. Each time to define her as a sexual

men attempt

object she to be an object but also a

proves not only

subject. The Grand Duke, for example, wants to add

The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 358

Fevvers to his collection of toys.

rare He tries to

reduce her to a sexual object, which the novel dramatizes

by showing how the Duke intends to literally reduce
Fevvers to a miniature of herself to fit into a tiny

gilded cage (like the cage in her for his toy

stage act)

collection (p. 189). He relieves Fevvers her toy,

of own

Ma Nelson's sword--Fevvers's patriarchal/phallic symbol,

with which she imitates men (p. 191). (Fevvers's sword may

be a toy or imitation, but it is 34)

nonetheless sharp.

Turner describes this scene very clearly:

This fate, to be a bird in a gilded cage, to be

an object of pleasure, a toy, is a metaphor for
Carter of the potential fate of women. Dazzled
by wealth, they could be destined to live a
sterile existence as the 'collector's item ' of
some man. ('Subjects and Symbols, ' p. 44)35

However, as Ricarda Schmidt comments, Fevvers never

responds passively:

In her voyage through the world of this novel

Fevvers does not simply become men's passive
object, for her wings ensure that she herself

34 the novel
As if the connection were not obvious,
describes both blade and penis as weapons (this recalls
the rape scene in Heroes and Villains which reminds
Marianne of her brother's stabbing). Rosencreutz has
Fevvers stretch the coffee table where she lies
out on
clenching her teeth and thinking of England. Then, she
glimpses

lying along his hairy old,

a shining something
his robe swung loose. This
gnarled old thigh as
more aggressive than his
something was a sight
poor thing, that bobbed about
other weapon,
unsharpened I saw this
uncharged, unprimed, ...
blade. (p. 83)
something was--a
35 is concerned to show
Turner's whole article
Fevvers, as both a subject and an
a symbol of all women,
examples (see pp. 40,42,
object, and he gives many useful
43,45,48,55,57,58,59)
.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 359
--II

constitutes a formidable subject which others

must react to. ('The Journey of the Subject, '
p. 68)

She uses the convention of woman as sexual object, uses

her body and its 'difference' to titillate, but turns
also

this convention around by turning the into

man a sexual

object: she reduces the Grand Duke to his tumescence,

just as Leilah reduced Evelyn, her 'difference'

and uses

as a means of escape.

III

As I have shown throughout this thesis, so much of

Carter's fiction suggests origins outside the text,

whether it is the continual promise of an underlying

meaning, allusions which can be traced to a source, a

character who appears to have an existence prior to and

beyond the confines of the novel, or, as is often the

case, a combination of all of these. Her fiction,

however, also shows, again and again, that whilst a

tracing is important, the final result is either

process

impossible to settles nothing. Nights at the

achieve, or

Circus, is no exception, and one of the most

of course,

powerful paradoxes is the way the novel constantly

encourages desire to imagine Fevvers's life

a reader's

before the the and to imagine her

opening of novel,
that identity is a
origins, whilst simultaneously showing

textual This will suggest that a

construct. section
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 360
--II

reading of Fevvers can itself be interpreted as a paradigm

of reading the novel in which she functions.

Like Rosencreuz and The Grand Duke, Walser attempts

to grasp the essential Fevvers. At the opening of the

novel, as I described in Chapter 1, Walser, who believes

that facts can be known and that knowledge of them is

conclusive, wants to find out the truth about Fevvers and

publish it in order to fix her once and for all as a

fraud. In order to define Fevvers, to discover if she is

indeed freak or fraud, fact or fiction, Walser attempts to

penetrate beneath both her story and her clothes, to her

origins. It appears, however, to be impossible to trace

36 indeed, herself is as
Fevvers's origins: she portrayed

an origin. Lizzie explains to her: '"You never existed

before. There's nobody to say what you should do or how

to do it. You are Year One"' (p. 198). Fevvers's origins

perhaps since, as she claims, her

are not articulatable,

birth totally convention: 'III never docked

was outside

the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me,

via what you call

but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched"' (p. 7).

no;

that her parents might have been

Furthermore she suggests

outside both culture and nature:

by I do not know. Who laid me

'Hatched; whom,
is to me, sir, as the nature
as much a mystery both
of my conception, my father and my mother
to me, and, some would say,
utterly unknown
more. ' (p. 21)
unknown to nature, what's

36 Jeanne Duval in 'Black Venus' is also without

known parentage. See
origins, whether place or
particularly p. 16.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 361

Schmidt claims that Fevvers 'fantasizes a beginning for

herself outside the Oedipal triangle, the

outside Law of
the Father, "a wholly female world" "governed by
... a

sweet and loving reason" [Nights the Circus,

at pp. 38 and
39 respectively]' ('The Journey the Subject,
of ' p. 67).

This world would be outside patriarchal language

conventions and the novel. The reference to fantasy,

however, is misleading, since we are never informed what

is fact and what is fiction in Fevvers's story. Schmidt,

of course, does suggest an origin for Fevvers as the child

of Eve from The Passion. Just as Eve's child could not be

born within the confines of the earlier novel, so

Fevvers's birth remains a mystery, which, it appears,

cannot be articulated within the later novel, except in

mythological terms. This lack of origins is symbolised by

Fevvers's claim to have been hatched and therefore not to

possess a navel, thus leaving no tangible trace of

forebears. Walser tries to verify this fact:

'What about her belly button? Hasn't she just

this minute told me she was hatched from an egg,
not gestated in utero. The oviparous species
are not, by definition, nourished by the
placenta; therefore they feel no need of the
umbilical cord... and, therefore, don't bear the
scar of its loss! Why isn't the whole of London
asking: does Fevvers have a belly-button? '
(pp. 17-18)

(The lack of a belly button also supports the

interpretation Fevvers as one of Carter's Eve figures. )

of

Typically, however, whilst the denial of Fevvers's

origins is being broadcast clearly, so the possibility of

discovering her is continually asserted. The

ancestry
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 362

link, for example, between intertextuality is

origins and
drawn explicitly when Fevvers describes herself '"Helen
as

of the High Wire"' (p. 7), the progeny Leda the

of and
Swan, and then describes the Titian this
painting of

subject hanging in Ma Nelson's house (that is, Fevvers's

interpretation of the Greek myth has been

already

displaced by Titian's interpretation of the myth):

I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what

might have been my own primal scene, my own
conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty
of feathers descending with imperious desire
upon the half-stunned and yet herself
impassioned girl. (p. 28)

The point here is that it is a convention that Helen of

Troy was hatched. Therefore, although the origin Fevvers

imagines for herself is, in one sense, outside

convention--she imagines herself the offspring of a

swan/God and a girl--this same origin is also inside, as a

purely fictional convention. Like so many things about

Fevvers, then, her origins are paradoxical: the allusion

to Leda and the Swan appears to offer something graspable,

and yet not only is it only a myth, which is both

traceable and yet untraceable, it is also suggested as

Fevvers's fantasy: it only 'might have been' her primal

scene. Importantly, disturbingly, while the text may

and

be suggesting that Fevvers has origins both inside and

outside of patriarchal convention, the particular origins

suggested by the to Leda and the Swan are

allusion
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 363
--II

explicitly connected to male domination by perhaps the

most violent symbol that 37

of aggression, of rape.

It is the desire to discover what lies behind

Fevvers, which on one level takes the form of a search for

her origins, that motivates the narrative of the novel.

As I have argued in Chapter 1, within the world of the

novel, Walser is trying find out the truth about Fevvers

in order to master her, just as Marianne in Heroes and

Villains tries continually to grasp hold of Donally's past

life. In the first section of the novel Fevvers claims to

be revealing the story of her life, sporadically offering

Walser snippets of supposedly verifiable information to

excite Walser's reporter's appetite for fact:

The girl was rumoured to have started her career

in freak shows. (Check, noted Walser. ) (p. 14)

First impression: physical ungainliness. Such

a lump it seems! But soon, quite soon, an
acquired grace asserts itself, probably the
strenuous exercise. (Check if she
result of
trained as a dancer. ) (p. 16)

However, itself as verifiable fact turns out

what suggests

to be untraceable. For example, telling the story of

Jenny, the former whores at Ma Nelson's, Fevvers

one of

her 'a gentleman from

and Lizzie mention relationship with

Chicago who makes sewing-machines--':

'--you don't mean--' interjected Walser.

'Indeed. '

37
Also disturbing is Fevvers's interpretation of
Titian's interpretation the Leda and the Swan myth,
of
Leda appears Leda is portrayed as
where a willing victim:
'half-stunned impassioned' (p"28).
and yet herself
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 364
--II

Walser tapped his teeth with his pencil tip,

faced with the dilemma of the first checkable
fact they'd offered him and the impossibility of
checking it. Cable Mrs--III and ask her is
she'd ever worked in a brothel run by a one-eyed
whore named Nelson? Contracts had been taken
out for less! (pp. 46-47)

The reader of the novel is drawn into a similar

position since, for example, the plot appears immediately

recognisable as that of a typical Victorian novel which

traces the life of an orphan hero or heroine who was

abandoned by his or her biological parents and adopted by

38
strangers. Indeed, Nights at the Circus relies upon a

whole wealth of conventions from late Victorian society

and literature which appear to make the novel more

graspable and containable. Fevvers explains:

She who found me on the steps at Wapping, me in

the laundry basket in which persons unknown left
me, a little babe most lovingly packed up in new
straw sweetly sleeping among a litter of broken
eggshells, she who stumbled over this poor,
creature clasped me at that moment in
abandoned
her arms out of the abundant goodness of her
heart and took me in. ' (p. 12)

Fevvers outside a brothel, 'at the door of a

was abandoned

certain house, know what I mean? ' (p. 21), which reverses

the familiar image the or convent steps. Given

of church

its structure the reader

reliance on a Victorian plot

the to gradually reveal the origins

would expect narrative

the mystery of her birth

of the orphaned heroine, solve

and the 'true' Fevvers. The continual suggestion

reveal

38 for Time (25 February 1985,

Paul Clay, writing
that Fevvers tells
p. 87), claims that 'The autobiography
to the skeptical is, for the business about
Walser except
melodrama. '
the wings, standard nineteenth-century
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ject? --II 365

that the mystery behind Fevvers and her miraculous wings

will finally be resolved is, of course, never satisfied.

Fevvers, then, appears to be without origins, outside

convention, and yet also, paradoxically, rooted in

convention. Just as the birth of Helen Troy takes

of

place outside human history, but has it,

an effect on so

Nights at the Circus makes the point that, if Fevvers

even

was conceived and given birth to outside convention (and

outside the novel), when seen in relation to other

characters (inside the novel), she has to be read in

conventional terms. Personages within the world of the

novel can only read her, and Fevvers can only read

herself, in relation to others and her surroundings;

similarly, the reader of the novel can only read her by

utilizing a series of accepted linguistic and literary

codes. The notion of identity, as I have argued in

Chapter 3, can only be articulated within convention and

when Fevvers imagines herself outside such parameters she

also has to imagine complete loss of self-identity. For

example, late in the novel, when Lizzie and Fevvers leave

the house, Fevvers wants to set off into the

musician's

find Lizzie complains that she is

wilderness to Walser and

obliged to 'tag along behind through the middle of

...

nowhere only because of the bonds of old affection'

(p. 279). to Lizzie's description of their

Fevvers objects

bond and explodes:

The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 366

'I never asked you to adopt me in the first

place, you miserable old witch! There I was,
unique and parentless, unshackled, unfettered by
the past, and the minute you clapped eyes on me
you turned me into a contingent being, enslaved
me as your daughter who was born nobody's
daughter--'

But there she stopped short, for the that

notion
nobody's daughter walked across nowhere in the
direction of nothing produced in her such
vertigo she was forced to pause and take a few
deep breaths. (pp. 279-80)

As I have argued in Chapter I, Nights at the Circus

goes to great lengths to insist that Fevvers's role as a

'Wonder' is dependent upon her audiences' suspension of

disbelief, where the suspension is inspired by the

coexistence of the credible and the incredible. Like both

Donally in Heroes and Villains and Zero in The Passion,

then, Fevvers is constructed in a symbiotic relationship

with her audience. Fevvers is always dependent upon an

audience to define her role, and she is defined by how

they see her: 'The eyes fixed upon her with astonishment,

with awe, the eyes that told her who she was' (p. 290).

Without her audience she begins to feel 'her outlines

waver' (p. 290) :

'Every little accident has taken you one step

down the road away from your singularity'
[Lizzie tells her]. 'You're fading away, as if
it was only always nothing but the discipline of
the that kept you in trim. (p. 280)
audience

Unlike Marianne, in Heroes and Villains, who

recognizes but refuses to accept her dependence upon

Jewel, Fevvers knows that she is dependent upon Walser,

him in to confirm her sense of herself

and seeks out order

in his Like Tristessa Leilah, Fevvers is

eyes. and
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 367
--II

constructed by, and constructs herself, as an object of

the gaze of her audience. She is aware of the convention

and she exploits it:

Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace,

she exhibited herself before the eyes of the
audience as if she were a marvellous present too
good to be played with. Look, not touch.

She was twice as large as life and as succinctly

finite as any object that is intended to be
seen, not handled. Look! Hands off! (p. 15)39

And, like Tristessa, Fevvers's artificiality is emphasised

without compromising her credibility: 'Her face, thickly

coated with rouge and powdered so that you can see how

beautiful she is from the back row of the gallery, is

wreathed in triumphant smiles' (p. 18). Fevvers's

difference from Tristessa, however, can be seen by looking

at another example of the same metaphor of the gaze. In

this example, Fevvers describes how she earned her keep at

Ma Nelson's by posing, painted with wet white like a

clown, as a 'living statue' of 'Victory with Wings':

I existed only as an object in men's eyes ...

Such was my apprenticeship for life, since is it
to the mercies of the eyes of others that we
not
on our voyage through the
commit ourselves
Sealed in this artificial egg, this
world? ...
sarcophagus of beauty, I waited, I
I could not have told you for
waited... although
it Except, I assure you, I
what was I waited.
did not await the kiss of a magic prince, sir!
I saw how such a kiss
With my two eyes, nightly
in for ever! '
would seal me up my appearance
(P. 39)

39
Similarly, Fevvers, like Tristessa (The Passion
inspires products (Nights at
p. 6), a range of commercial
the Circus, p. 8) .
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 368
--II

Both characters are constructed by male fantasy, as Gina

Wisker comments with regard to Fevvers:

In Ma Nelson's homely whorehouse Fevvers

...
poses as a statue, painted white. She is aware
that her pose of icon of protected chastity
panders to man's predilections for mastery over
a creature straight from his own fantasies.
('Winged Women and Werewolves, ' p. 91)

Tristessa, as I have already shown, does, indeed, becomes

her role and is sealed up in her appearance for ever, but

Fevvers capitalizes upon her own doubleness. She

maintains a distance between her image and some other

self, which continually suggi gists that beneath the wet

white or stage make-up there is another, more 'real'

Fevvers hiding, and suggests to the reader that there is a

40 Walser,
'real' character beyond the text. of course,

sits through a symbolic stripping of this stage make-up as

Fevvers tells her story, but, of course, does not appear

to come any closer to the 'real' Fevvers.

The of Fevvers's role as a symbol of Woman

complexity

is in the novel by the fact that her stage

emphasised

image both and yet rooted in

is also double, otherworldly

the market economy. She is an exaggerated example of

woman as object of visual pleasure and object of exchange,

that Fevvers is not exchanged between

except, of course,

but herself. Lizzie explains to her:

men, exchanges

40 Marianne in Heroes
In this way, Fevvers resembles
she watched her own
and Villains at her wedding, where
bride, dictated by Donally.
performance of the role of
her
The difference, however, is that Fevvers has created
this distance throughout.
own role, and that she maintains
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 369
--II

All you can do to earn your living is to make a

show of yourself. You're doomed to that. You
must give pleasure of the eye, or else you're
good for nothing. For you, it's a
always
symbolic exchange in the market-place. (p. 185)

Schmidt identifies Fevvers's dependence public

upon
recognition of her symbolic meaning as a free woman and

examines the political significance of this fact:

Fevvers discovers her excellent exchange value

on the market for wonders, humbugs, sensations.
The fact that Fevvers can function as a freak or
as a wonder confirms the non-essentialist
character of femininity. Femininity is a social
construction, its value is not inherent but
determined in social exchange, on the market.
('The Journey of the Subject, ' p. 68)

That is, Fevvers's identity, and therefore the identity of

Woman which she represents, is shown to be a construct

because it is revealed as open to change (change of

interpretation). Identity, the novel suggests, is created

out of the mutually dependent relationship--or 'social

exchange'--between audience and performer, where the

performer/Fevvers/Woman does have power to challenge

definitions. This power, however, is only

existing

functional confines, which, in this

within conventional

case are represented by the market economy; and, within

this Fevvers's to power is signalled by a

economy, rise

taking advantage of her (at

shift from the market economy

Madame Schreck's) to Fevvers herself milking the market

41 The shows that

(though not always successfully). novel

41 it is Fevvers indulges her

Interestingly, when
commodity that she
greed for money and uses h er body as a
finds with men. This
herself in dangerous situations
(see for example, pp. 172,182,186)
recurrent greed motif
her as rooted in convention.
also reinforces the notion of
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 370

there can be no utopian space, or woman, outside of

accepted ideology, since any such disappears

utopia and
has to be continually redefined by means of conventional

codes; thus, towards the end of the novel, Fevvers fades

without her audience and has to be by the

revitalized
'Oooooooh! ' (p. 290) of wonder from Walser's tribe.
adopted

Tristessa's relationship with her audience, as I discussed

in Chapter 4, is one of confirmation: she reflects back

their best and most recognisable image of themselves.

Fevvers, however, challenges her audience by exposing and

exploiting their own preconceptions to make them question

her identity, and in doing so, rethink their own

42
position.

IV

Is Fevvers a New Woman figure? Fevvers, as I

suggested earlier, represents what exists already, she

represents the here and now. She is not the heroine of a

Bildungsroman, a figure with whom we identify, and from

42 There is important difference between

also an
Tristessa that is, a
and Fevvers's performance mediums,
difference between Hollywood movies and the circus. In
the suspend disbelief for the
movies, audiences willingly
duration film, that, however involved
of the and assume
they become, the world of the movie is fictional.
Circuses, however, are supposed to be
present acts which
real, and are either believed or not: in the circus,
be faked. The circus, of course, is
certain things cannot
connected with the notion of carnival, and several critics
have interpreted Nights the Circus in the light of
at
Bakhtin's the liberating aspects of the
writing about
Rory P. B. Turner's article, 'Subjects and
carnivalesque.
Symbols, ' is the most comprehensive example.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 371

whose progress through the novel learn, learns

we as she
about herself (like many Carter's
of other heroines and
heroes). If she appears to change during the course of
the novel it is because Walser's, interpretation
and our,

of her 43
changes. As Chapter 1 documented, if the novel
is a Bildungsroman, its hero is Walser; each of his

attempts to uncover the true Fevvers involves a

challenging and productive engagement with her, which

changes him. Similarly, all attempts by the to

reader get

to the bottom of Carter's writing (whether it be in search

of meaning, character, tracing an allusion or trying to

fix a notion of gender) prove a challenge to the very

reading conventions which must be used in the attempt.

The shift in Walser's interpretation of Fevvers which

happens during the course of the novel, and which I have

described in detail in Chapter 1, is replayed in the

concluding pages, by the juxtaposition of two summaries of

events. Before his sexual encounter with Fevvers and the

turn of the century, Walser imagines the content of the

copy he intends to file for his newspaper, describing his

adventures. This first version, which Walser imagines,

represents a nineteenth-century interpretation of events:

'I am Jack Walser, an American citizen. I

joined the circus of Colonel Kearney in order to
delight public with accounts of a few
my reading

43 interview John Haffenden, in

In the with
Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), Carter
recalls with pleasure an American friend's comments upon
characterisation in Nights at the Circus: 'Everyone
changes throughout the he wrote, except for
novel,
Fevvers--"who doesn't as expand"' (p. 88).
so much change
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 372

nights at the circus and, as a clown,

before performed
the Tsar of All the Russians, to great
applause. (What a story! ) I was derailed by
brigands in Transbaikalia
and lived as a wizard
among the natives for a while. (God, what a
story! ) Let me introduce Mrs Sophie
my wife,
Walser, who formerly had a successful career on
the music-hall stage the
under name of--'
(pp. 293-94)

It focuses on the power the itself--'What

of story a

story! '--which relates Walser's exploits and almost

totally effaces Fevvers. She Walser's
appears only as

appendage, who no longer has an individual identity: her

career has been abandoned and even her name 'Fevvers' has

been erased and replaced by her husband's.

The extraordinary combination of sex with Fevvers and

the turning of the century interrupt this account, produce

a transformation, and result in a complete rethinking and

restructuring of Walser as reader: 'Precipitated in

ignorance and bliss into the next century, there, after it

was over, Walser took himself apart and put himself

together again' (p. 294). Now he has to rewrite his story

from a totally new perspective:

'Jack, ever an adventurous boy, ran away with

the circus for the sake of a bottle blonde in
whose hands he was putty since the first moment
he saw her. He got himself into scrape upon
scrape, danced with a tigress, posed as a roast
chicken, finally got himself an apprenticeship
in the higher form of the confidence trick,
initiated by a wily old pederast who bamboozled
him completely. All that seemed to happen to me
in the third person as though, most of my life,
I watched it but did not live it. And now,
hatched out of the shell of unknowing by a
combination of a blow on the head and a sharp
spasm of erotic ecstasy, I shall have to start
all over again. ' (p. 294).
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 373
--II

The jump from first-person in first

narrative the version

of events to third-person in this second version

represents a shift from one mode of reading to another.

The second version stresses Fevvers's (his text's)

seductive power; and Walser's self-conscious shift back to

the first person, and his description of his own hatching,

reveal his conscious knowledge of the change he has

undergone. This account does not represent a closing down

of interpretation, but rather, along with the new century,

it presents a new beginning, and a redefinition of the

position of the reader, which is not centred around his

own identity.

The first mode of reading represents the state of

affairs at the opening of the novel, where Walser

anticipates a satisfactory resolution of Fevvers's motto,

'"Is she fact or is she fiction? "' (p. 7). The novel does

not end with a revelation of truth, however, but ends with

a peal laughter, part of which may be

of universalising

aimed at Walser, and part at the reader for thinking that

'certainty' is what reading, and liberation, are all

about. John Haffenden has interpreted Fevvers's comment

'I fooled you, (p. 294) and the resulting extraordinary

laughter 'I read it that

at the end very specifically:

she does in fact have wings, but has she played a vast

' (Novelists, p. 90). But

confidence-trick all the while?

are real is
the question of whether or not Fevvers's wings

the The laughter which closes

not answered within novel.

the it high; it can be read as a

novel also explodes sky
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ect? 374
--II

denial of the very possibility tying the

of closure, of

material down to hard fact, of resolving the mystery, of

achieving a definitive interpretation. But it cannot be

read as a denial of the desire to do so. As Carter

herself answers Haffenden:

'It's actually a statement about the nature of

fiction, about the nature of her [Fevvers'sJ
narrative....

It's actually doing something utterly

illegitimate--in a way I like--because ending on
that line doesn't make you realize the
fictionality of what has gone before, it makes
you start inventing other fictions, things that
might have happened--as though the people were
really real, with real lives. Things might have
happened to them other than the things I have
said have happened to them. So that really is
an illusion. It's inviting the reader to write
lots of other novels for themselves, to continue
taking these people as if they were real. It is
not like saying that you should put away the
puppets and close the box. I didn't realize I
was doing that at the time, but it is inviting
the reader to take one further step into the
fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming
out of it and looking at it as though it were an
artifact. So that's not postmodernist at all, I
suppose: it's the single most nineteenth-
century gliture in the novel! ' (Novelists,
pp. 90-91)

In the final section of the novel, 'Envoi, ' Walser's

knowledge of the relativity of reality, where only matters

of interpretation perspective are important (a

and

44 interesting
is as a
This
quotation also
Chapter 3. Alison Lee, in
description of character: see
Realism Postmodern British Fiction (London:
and Power:
Routledge, 1990) p. 113, points out how the extraordinarily
in Alistair Gray's Lanark (1981)
self-conscious Epilogue
(London: Panther, 1982) exposes and exploits similar
'Realist techniques. ' Lee refers particularly to
forty-five to fifty, when the
references made to Chapters
novel ends at Chapter forty-four.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 375

demythologising mode of reading), is complemented by the

discovery that, far from this making everything a matter
of scepticism, it reveals precisely how powerful
conventions are (a celebratory mode of reading).
Fevvers's power over Walser (and over other male figures
in the novel), lies in her her
story, wings (the sign of
her otherness), and the myth of her virginity; all of

which exert the gravitational pull of the unknown, the

monstrous, and all of which are systematically shown to be

45
constructions. Fevvers's power attracts Walser to her

dressing-room at the opening of the novel, and leads him

to join the circus to follow her around the world. He

wishes to master her both critically and sexually: he

wishes to penetrate behind both Fevvers's story and her

hymen, in order to master her monstrousness and her

virginity (which is also monstrous), although, of course,

to master either would be to render them non-existent, and

45 Sexuality in some of Carter's work, particularly

the collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, has
been literalised as beastliness. There is obviously a
link between beastliness and monstrousness. Sylvia
Bryant, in 'Re-Constructing Oedipus Through "Beauty and
The Beast, "' (Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and
the Arts, 31, no. 4 (Fall 1989), 439-53), for example,
interprets beasts as challenges to convention, and she
reads the girls who are transformed into beasts as
liberatory figures. Quoting from Teresa de
women
Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema
(London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 155, Bryant describes the
girl in 'The Tiger's Bride' as

an alternative model the female for

subject's
desire, constructing what de Lauretis says
feminist cinematic and written novels must:
'the terms of reference of another measure of
desire the of visibility for a
and conditions
different subject. ' (p. 448)
social
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 376

therefore to prove nothing, since both exist only as

constructions of the unmasterable. By the end of the

novel, when Walser has learnt that everything is a product

of convention, Fevvers ceases to be monstrous in his eyes:

hence when he does have the chance to her
verify whether

wings are real, or whether she has a belly button, he is

no longer interested (p. 292). He is still drawn towards

her, however, by the power of the myth of her virginity,

and by her Otherness as a woman, and it is the power of

these myths, even though he is aware of them as myths,

which still attracts him, and binds him, to Fevvers.

Fevvers and Walser are mutually dependent for the sake of

their own sense of their identities. Importantly,

however, their dependency is not celebrated in marriage

(as many reviewers seem to assume), but in an

extraordinary coupling. They do not conform to the fairy-

tale custom which Lizzie outlines for Fevvers, in which

'the Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon's

lair is always forced to marry her, whether they've taken

a liking to one another or not, ' all in the cause of a

"'happy ending", (p. 281). Fevvers does not 'give' herself

to Walser, or give up her subjectivity; Walser's and

Fevvers's bond is between two people and their

individuality. Turner writes:

For Walser and Fevvers, the bond is made of

'hubris, desire, and imagination, ' in a word,
They other's ideals, but
confidence. are each
they also idiosyncratic. ('Subjects and
remain
Symbols, ' p. 56)
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 377

Their coupling at the end the is

of novel premised upon a
reconstruction of gender identity and gender roles.
Walser sees Fevvers differently, in his
since, eyes, as
Lizzie comments, she has turned from 'a freak into a

woman' (p. 283), where the notion of 'Woman' has been

challenged and reconstructed. Fevvers is dominant because

'nature had equipped her only for the "woman top"
on

position' (p. 292). Walser finds that his quest for

Fevvers has radically challenged his own sense of self:

'He was as much himself again as he ever would be, and yet

that "self" would never be the same again' (p. 292), and he

is 'busily reconstructing' (p. 293) himself as a New Man.

Ironically, of course, when Walser does have sex with

Fevvers she proves not to be a virgin after all. Walser

asks Fevvers:

'Fevvers, only one question.. why did you go to

.
such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me
you were the "only fully-feathered intacta in
the history of the world"? '

She began to laugh.

'I fooled then! ' she said. 'Gawd, I fooled

you,
you! ' (p. 294)

But it is clear that physical penetration takes

whilst

Walser to dominating Fevvers as a woman, he does

no closer

discover the Fevvers's construction of her own

power of

be interpreted as a symbol of the

virginity, which might

power of all the other 'unknowns' which characterise

'Woman, ' have lured him towards her. Whether or

and which

Fevvers's physically, or whether or

not virginity exists

her is and does not

not wings are real, unimportant,
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 378

affect the potency of the notion Fevvers

of as a winged
virgin: the power of the construction operates

nevertheless. And it is this power, the double power of

the unknown (which appears to be outside convention, and

which is common to all has been

women), which shown to be

a patriarchal construct (and is therefore inside

convention), which Fevvers exploits to the full throughout

the novel. She consciously uses it in order to attract

her audience and seduce her mate, in turn,
who,

continually defines and redefines her as the impossible:

a wondrous liberated woman with wings.

CONCLUSION

Both Fevvers and the liberatory reading space I have

tried to illuminate throughout the thesis are conceived

out of paradox: out of the juxtaposition, the

'intercourse, ' of the two irreconcilable modes of

reading--celebratory and demythologising, transcendent and

textual--which Carter's fiction dramatises and which this

thesis describes. The fruit of the intercourse between

the two modes of reading is also necessarily double,

because it represents what is known and yet what is

unknown. On the hand, the relationship results in

one

recognition and revaluing, where all apparently graspable

elements of fiction like character, identity, gender,

narrative centres, intertextual origins, and meaning, are

revealed as the conventions; but these

products of reading
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 379

are recognised and valued as very powerful conventions,

which are necessary to the reading process. On the other

hand, it is this very process knowledge
of recognition and

which opens up the possibility that something new might

born. Once conventions are recognised as conventions,

they must also be recognised as open to change. It is

change which is unknown, which is unpredictable, and which

is liberating. Because change is unknown, however, it is

also potentially 'monstrous. ' Fevvers represents this

doubleness: she is both known and yet unknown, a

representative of common 'man' and yet also, in some ways,

a monster.

The liberatory reading space is similarly

monstrous--it is both a product of, and produces,

knowledge and the unknown (because it is a space for re-

interpretation and change). Its potential might be

represented by the extraordinary and universalising

laughter which erupts uncontrollably at the end of Nights

at the Circus!

The spiralling tornado of Fevvers' laughter

began to twist and shudder across the entire
globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant
that unfolded beneath it, until
comedy endlessly
everything that lived and breathed, everywhere,
was laughing. (p. 295)

This is the 'ambivalent gay, triumphant, and at the

...
same time deriding' carnival laughter which
mocking,
46 it is laughter
Bakhtin has described so brilliantly.

46
Mikhail Rabelais and His World,
Bakhtin,
translated by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
M. I. T. Press, 1968), pp. 11-12.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 380
--II

which 'asserts and denies buries '

... and revives,

celebrates and demythologises. It is also this

paradoxical, one might even say 'monstrous, ' laughter

which represents transformation, open-endedness, and the

non-programmability of change, and it reminds the reader

that we are all part of the 'giant comedy. '

In The Passion of New Eve, the women of Beulah claim

that 'Space is a woman' (p. 53), and Chapter 2 of this

thesis draws upon Derrida's model of invagination and the

metaphor of the vagina in Carter's work to begin to

portray the liberatory reading space which is opened up in

Carter's fiction (where 'invagination' represents an

impossible space or topography). Earlier in this chapter

I pointed to the connections, which Carter's fiction

exploits, between patriarchal definitions of revolutionary

women, and definitions of anything which appears to pose a

threat to the monstrous; and this includes

status quo, as

liberatory reading space. I have used

any notion of a

these definitions, however, just as Carter's fiction uses

them, in to but also exploit, the gender

order reveal,

inscribes them. I
bias with which patriarchal convention

do to to an essentialist position which

not wish subscribe

space is a purely
claims that any such liberatory reading

that, in so far as it is
female space, but rather to claim

it is a 'feminist'
a space where gender can be rethought,

the term 'feminist'

space. In terms of Carter's work,

of the limitations
signifies the exploration and exposure

definitions both The liberatory reading

of of genders.
The Liberation of the Female Subject? 381
--II

space is also one in which a liberated female subject can

be imagined.

My analyses of Angela Carter's novels show a

what

powerful tool fiction can be in the feminist struggle. In

the introduction I argue that Carter's fiction has in

much

common with, and indeed, may often be read as if it were,

critical theory. As I suggested there, critical theory

and fiction constitute two separate discourses, and yet,

typically, Carter's self-conscious fiction often appears

to combine the two. Carter, however, does opt primarily

to exploit the potential of a fictional mode of

expression, and this thesis shows that fiction,

particularly the novel form (which is Carter's 'chosen

form, '47 and which is historically a feminist mouthpiece

with a predominantly female readership), is potentially a

more powerful tool than any theoretical treatise. First,

fiction is obviously a more popular medium which reaches a

wider audience. Fiction can also be read on many

different levels, which facilitates the combination of

theory; Carter to John Haffenden how it

story and explains

allows 'mingling of adventure and the discussion of what

a

loosely concepts' (Novelists,

one might call philosophical

48 fiction what might

p. 87). In this way can popularise

be dismissed 'philosophical' or 'political'

otherwise as

47 Kerryn Goldsworthy, in Meanjin,

Interview with
44, No. 1 (1985), 4-13 (p. 8).

48 Carter claims that 'the

the In
same paragraph,
idea behind Circus was very much to
Nights at the
p. 87).
entertain and instruct' (Novelists,
The Liberation of the Female Subject? --II 382

debate. Gina Wisker makes the point that in Carter's

work, 'elaborate fantasy and historical

material,

engagement are not mutually exclusive: the is

one a

vehicle for the other' ('From Winged Woman to Werewolf, '

P. 91).

The crucial difference between Carter's fiction and

non-fiction is a matter of the former's theatricality

(which includes self-conscious dramatisations its

of own

concern with its own status as fiction). As I have shown

throughout the thesis, Carter's fiction illuminates and

explores many feminist arguments, both social and

theoretical, by enacting them. Carter's fiction

dramatises, criticises, and also speculates upon a variety

of specific feminist alternatives. The power of the

fictional medium is that it can reveal the attraction of

certain political positions without totally subscribing to

them, and without totally dismissing them. Within fiction

Carter can posit the impossible: she creates a larger-

than-life celebratory woman with liberatory wings and yet

questions the concept of identity. That is, Carter

very

creates an ungraspable but positive and productive symbol

of hope and change which, because of its construction out

of force which cannot be

paradox, represents a powerful

easily dismissed or ignored, but has to be engaged with.

Carter's fiction, I have shown, also involves the

as

debate by particular (often

reader in the political using

t at the same time

seductive) narrative conventions, whils

revealing its seduction. This process

very means of
The Liberation of the Female Sub-ject? 383
--II

exposes the reader's necessary involvement with both the

political and literary conventions in question, and

reflects upon the way we read both fiction and the world,

which may change the way we interpret our own position as

readers.

Reading and writing about Angela Carter's work

necessarily involves contact with what has been defined as

'monstrousness'--the possibility of change and liberation

which is both exciting and yet threatening. All of her

fiction, as this thesis demonstrates, self-consciously

foregrounds, materialises and capitalises upon its own

monstrousness. (One more reason, perhaps, why so few

critics write about her work. ) To read Carter's fiction,

then, is to with a monster, but also, importantly,

wrestle

like Walser, to be invited to reinterpret, in a highly

positive way, the very notion of monstrousness.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 1

Works by Angela Carter

(Works are arranged chronologically by date of first

publication: where this differs from the date of the
edition used, I have indicated it after the title. )

Section I: Carter's Fiction

Shadow Dance (London: Heinemann, 1966)

Unicorn (First published in vision magazine, Bristol)

(Leeds: Location Press, 1966)

The Magic Toyshop (1967) (London: Virago, 1981)

Several Perceptions (London: Heinemann, 1968)

Heroes and Villains (1969) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)

Miss Z. The Dark Young Lady (juvenile) (London:

Heinemann, 1970)

The Donkey Prince (juvenile) (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1970)

Love (London: Hart-Davis, 1971; revised edition, London:

Picador, 1988)

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)

Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London: Quartet, 1974;

revised edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 1987)

The Passion of New Eve (1977) (London: Virago, 1982)

Martin Leman's Comic and Curious Cats (juvenile) (London:

Gollancz, 1979)

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979)

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)

'The Quilt Maker' (1981), in Passion Fruit: Romantic

Fiction Jeanette Winterson (London:
with a Twist, ed.
Pandora, 1986), pp. 117-38

Moonshadow (juvenile), with Justine Todd (London:

written
Gollancz, 1982)
Bibliography 1 385

Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (juvenile)

(London: Gollancz, 1982)

Nights at the Circus (1984) (London: Picador, 1985)

Come Unto These Yellow Sands: Four Radio Plays

(Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1985)

Black Venus (London: Chatto and Windus, 1985)

'Ashputtle: or The Mother's Ghost' (1987) (The Virago
Book of Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby (London:
Virago, 1990), pp. 324-25. A longer version was
published in The Village Voice Literary Supplement,
March 1990, pp. 22-23

'The Merchant of Shadows, ' in the London Review of Books,

26 October 1989, pp. 25-27

Section II: Carter's Non-fiction

'Afterword' to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (London:

Quartet, 1974 (not included in the 1987 revised
edition))

The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

(London: Virago, 1979)

'The Language of Sisterhood, ' in The State of the

Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980),
pp. 226-34

'"Fools Let be my song, "' in Vector,

are my theme, satire
109 (1982), 26-36

Introduction to Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)

Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (London: Virago, 1982)

'Alison's Giggle, ' in The Left and the Erotic, ed. Eileen
Phillips (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983),
pp. 53-68

'Notes From the Front Line, ' in On Gender and Writing, ed.
Michelene Wandor (London: Pandora, 1983), pp. 69-77

Preface to Come Unto these Yellow Sands (Newcastle:

Bloodaxe Books, 1985), pp. 7-13
Bibliography 1
386

Introduction to Wayward Girls Wicked Women (London:

and
Virago, 1986)

Images of Frida Kahlo (London: Redstone Press, 1989)

Introduction to The Virago Book Fairy Tales (London:

of
Virago, 1990)

III Interviews

Sage, Lorna, 'The Savage Sideshow, ' in New Review, 39/40

(1977), 51-57

Mortimer, John, 'The Stylish Prime of Miss Carter, ' in The

Sunday Times, 24 January 1982, p. 36

'The Company of Angela Carter, ' in Marxism Today, January

1985, pp. 20-22

Goldsworthy, Kerryn, Meanjin, 44, No. 1 (1985), 4-13

Haffenden, John, Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen,

1985), pp. 76-96

Smith, Barbara, 'From Classical Archetypes to Modern

Stereotypes, ' in Spare Rib, November 1985, pp. 36-39

Snitow, Ann, 'Angela Carter: Wild Thing, ' in The Village

Voice Literary Supplement, June 1989, pp. 14-17
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 2

Secondary Texts Concerning Angela Carter's Work

Alexander, Marguerite, Flights from Realism: Themes and

Strategies in Postmodernist British and American
Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1990)

Brown, Carolyn, 'Theoretical Fictions, ' Ph. D thesis,

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Faculty of
Arts, University of Birmingham, 1985

Bryant, Sylvia, 'Re-Constructing Oedipus Through "Beauty

and The Beast, "' in Criticisms: A Quarterly for
Literature and the Arts, 31, No. 4 (Fall 1989), 439-53

Campbell-Dixon, Anne, 'Mae West Would Have Approved, '

Daily Telegraph, July 31 1987

Clark, Robert, 'Angela Carter's Desire Machine, ' in

Women's Studies--An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14,
No. 2 (1987), 147-61

Cranny-Francis, Anne, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of

Generic Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990)

Donelly, Frances, 'Edinburgh by Carter and Son, ' in the

Observer (London), 15-21 August 1987, p. 85

Duncker, Patricia, 'Re-imagining the Fairy Tales: Angela

Carter's Bloody Chambers, ' in Literature and History,
10: 1 (Spring 1984), 3-14. Also published in Popular
Fictions: Essays in Literature and History, ed.
Peter Humm, Paul Stignant and Peter Widdowson
(London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 222-36

Engstrom, 'Bewitching Wit, ' in the Boston Globe, 28

John,
October 1988, pp. 51,62

Gerrard, the Mainstream: How Feminism Has

Nicci, Into
(London: Pandora, 1989)
Changed Women's Writing

Grossman, '"Born to Bleed": Myth, Pornography

Michele,
"The Bloody Chamber, "'
and Romance in Angela Carter's
30/31 (Spring 1988), 148-60
in The Minnesota Review,

Proverbs and the

Haase, Donald P., 'Is Seeing Believing?
Tale, ' in Proverbium, 7
Film Adaptation of a Fairy
(1990), pp. 89-104
Bibliography 2 388

Hanson, Clare, 'Each Other: Images of Otherness inthe

Short Fiction of Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys and Angela
Carter, ' in Journal of the Short Story in 10
English,
(Spring 1988), 67-82

Harvey, Eve, introduction to Carter's "'Fools are my

theme, Let satire be my song, "' in Vector, 109
(1982), p. 26

Holden, Kate, 'Women's Writing and the Carnivalesque, ' in

Literature Teaching Politics, 4 (1985), 5-15
Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: Histo
Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988)

---- The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge,

1989)

Jordan, Elaine, 'Enthralment: Angela Carter's Speculative

Fictions, ' in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's
Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold,
1990), pp. 19-40

Kappeler, Susanne, The Pornography of Representation

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)

Kearns, George, 'History and Games, ' Hudson Review, XLII,

No. 2 (Summer 1989), 335-44

Kenyon, Olga, Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English

Writing in the Seventies and Eighties (Brighton:
Harvester, 1988)

---- Writing Women: Contemporary Women Novelists (London:

Pluto Press, 1991)

Landon, Brooks, 'Eve at the End of the World: Sexuality

and the Reversal of Expectations in Novels by Joanna
Russ, Angela Carter, and Thomas Berger, ' in Erotic
Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, ed.
Donald Palumbo (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986),
pp. 61-74

Laugharne, Elfrida, Carter entry in Dictionary of British

Women Writers, ed. Janet Todd (London: Routledge,
1989), pp. 127-28

Lewallen, 'Wayward Girls butWicked Women? Female

Avis,
The Bloody Chamber, ' in
Sexuality in Angela Carter's
Sexuality in Film and
Perspectives on Pornography:
Gary Day Clive Bloom (New York:
Literature, ed. and
St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 144-58
Bibliography 2 389

Lokke, Kari E., 'Bluebeard and The Bloody Chamber: The

Grotesque of Self-Parody and Self-Assertion, ' in
Frontiers: A Journal Women's Studies,
of 10, No. 1
(1988), 7-12

McDowell, Margaret B., Carter in Contemporary

entry
Novelists (London: St. James Press, 1986), pp. 173-75
McEwan, Ian, 'Sweet Smell of Excess, ' in The Sunday Times
Magazine, 9 September 1984, pp. 42-44

McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen,

1987)

Mansfield, Paul, 'Tell-Tale Sisters, ' in the Guardian, 25

October 1990, p. 32
Mills, Sara, Lynne Pearce, Sue Spaull, and Elaine Millard,
Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)

Monteith, Moira, ed., Women's Writing: A Challenge to

Theory (Brighton: Harvester, 1986)

Morgan-Griffiths, Lauris, 'Well Wicked Times by Word of

Mouth, ' in the Observer, 21 October 1990

Norris, Christopher, Derrida (Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Harvard University Press, 1987)

Palmer, Paulina, 'From "Coded Mannequin" to Bird Woman:

Angela Carter's Magic Flight, ' in Women Reading
Women's Writing, ed. Sue Roe (Brighton: Harvester,
1987), pp. 177-205

---- Contemporary Women's Fiction: Narrative Practice and

Feminist Theory (Jackson: University of Mississippi,
1989

Punter, David, 'Angela Carter: Supersessions of the

Masculine, ' in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction,
25, No. 4 (1984), 209-22. Also published in David
Punter, The Hidden Script: Writing and the
Unconscious (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)

---- The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic

Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London:
Longman, 1

Quinn, Antoinette, Carter's

'Angela Contemporary Fairy
Tales, ' in La nouvelle de langue anglaise/The Short
Story, V (Rencontres Internationales) (Publications
de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1988), 101-10
Bibliography 2
390
Rose, Ellen Cronan, 'Through the Looking Glass: When
Women Tell Fairy Tales, ' in The Voyage In: Fictions
of Female Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne
Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1983), pp. 209-43
Sage, Lorna, 'The Savage Sideshow, in
' New Review, 39/40
(1977), 51-57

---- Carter entry in Dictionary of Literary Biography,

Vol. 14, 'British Novelists Since 1960, ' ed. Jay L.
Halio (Detroit, Michigan: Bruccoli Clark, 1983),
pp. 205-12

Schmidt, Ricarda, 'The Journey the Subject in Angela

of
Carter's Fiction, ' in Textual Practice, 3, No. 1
(Spring 1989), 56-75

Sebastyen, Amanda, 'The Mannerist Marketplace, ' in New

Socialist (March 1987), pp. 34-39
Smith, Anne, 'Myths and the Erotic, ' in Women's Review, 1
(November 1985), 28-29

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, ed., The Female Body in Western

Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986)

---- Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant

Garde (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 1990)

Tolley, Michael J., Carter entry in Twentieth-Century

Science-Fiction Writers, 2nd Edition, ed. Curtis
Smith (London: St James Press, 1986), pp. 122-23

Turner, Rory P. B., 'Subjects and Symbols: Transforma-

tions of Identity in Nights at the Circus, ' in
Folklore Forum, 20, Nos. l 2 (1987), 39-60

Waugh, Patricia, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the

Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989)

Wilson, Robert, Rawdon, 'SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter,

In/Out/In the Postmodern Nexus, ' in Ariel: A Review
of International English Literature, 20, No. 4
(October 1989), 96-114

Wisker, Gina, 'Winged Women and Werewolves: How do we

Read Angela Carter? ' in Ideas and Production: A
Journal in the History of Ideas, Issue four: Poetics
(1986), 87-98
Bibliography 2 391

---- 'Woman Writer, Woman Reader, Male Institution: The

Experience of a Contemporary Women's Writing
Seminar, ' in Literature Teaching Politics, 3 (1984)
18-31
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 3

Other Secondary Texts

Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fourth

Edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart 1981)
and Winston,
Attridge, Derek, 'Joyce and the Ideology Character, ' in
of
James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, Bernard
ed.
Benstock (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
1988), pp. 152-57

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene

Iswolsky (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M. I. T. Press,
1968)

Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1968)

---- Image-Music-Text, tr. Stephen Heath (Glasgow:

Fontana, 1977)

---- Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin,

1973)

---- S/Z: An Essay, tr. Richard Miller (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1974)

---- 'Theory of the Text' in Untying the Text: A Post-

Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 31-47

Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, ed. and tr. H. M.

Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)

Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and

Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen,
1985)

Benjamin, Jessica, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,

Feminism, Domination (New York:
and The Problems of
Pantheon Books, 1988)

Bettelheim. Brune. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meanin

Fairy Tales New York, Knopf, 1 6)
and Importance of

Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship

(Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1988)

Charters, Ann, Kerouac (San Francisco: Straight Arrow

Books, 1973)
Bibliography 3
393

Cixous, Helene, 'The Character "Character,

of "' New
Literary History, 5 (1974), 383-402

Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born

Woman, tr. Betty Wing (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986)

Crowder, Dianne Griffin, 'Amazons and Mothers? Monique

Wittig, Helene Cixous and Theories of Women's
Writing, ' in Contemporary Literature, XXIV, No. 2
(1983), 117-44

Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism

after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983)

---- Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics

and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1975)

Daly, Mary, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of

Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973)

---- Gyn/Ecolo ý: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism

(Boston: Beacon Press,

Derrida, Jacques, interview with Christie V. McDonald,

'Choreographies, ' Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1982), 66-76

---- 'Living On: Border Lines, ' tr. James Hulbert, in

Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom, Paul
de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J.
Hillis Miller (New York: Continuum, 1986), pp. 75-176

---- Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)

---- Signeponge/Signsponge, tr. Richard Rand (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1984)

Eco, Umberto, Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose'

(London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985)

Eliot, T. S., introduction to Djuna Barnes, Nightwood,

(New York: New Directions, 1961)

Ellmann, Mary, Thinking Women (London: Virago,

about
1979)

Felman, Shoshana, Writing and Madness: (Literature/

Philosophy/Psychoanalysis, tr. Martha Noel Evans and
Cornell University Press, 1985)
the author (Ithaca:

Felski, Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist

Rita, Beyond
Literature Social Change (London: Hutchinson
and
Radius, 1989)
Bibliography 3 394

Ferrer, Daniel, 'Characters in Ulysses: '"The Featureful

Perfection of Imperfection"' in James Joyce: The
Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 148-51
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth the
of
Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1979)

---- The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human

Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970)

Fuss, Dianna, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and

Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989)

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the

Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1979)

Heath, Stephen, 'Joan Riviere and the Masquerade, ' in

Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James
Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986),
pp. 45-61

Hughes, Merritt Y., introduction to John Milton, Paradise

Lost (New York: Macmillan, 1985)

Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative: The

Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1984)

Ignatieff, Michael, 'Garbo--The Mirror of Our Illusions

(Obituary), in the Observer, 22 April 1990, p. 17

Irigaray, Luce, Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris:

Minuit 1977)

Speculum the Other Woman, tr. Gillian C. Gill

---- of
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985)

James, Henry, 'The Art of Fiction, in The Critical

Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends,
ter (New York: St. Martin's Press,
ed. David H. Ric
1989), pp. 422-33

Jardine, Alice A., Gynesis" Configurations of an and

Cornell University Press, 1985)
Modernity (Ithaca:

Kracauer, Caligari to Hitler: A

Siegfried, From
the German Film (Princeton:
Psychological History of
Princeton University Press, 1947)

Kristeva, Time, ' tr. Alice Jardine and

Julia, 'Women's
of Women in Culture
Harry Blake, in Si ns: Journal
7, No-1 (1981), 13-35
and Society,
Bibliography 3
395

Kuhn, Annette, The Power of the Image: Essays on

Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1985)

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977)

Lane, Michael (ed), Structuralism: A Reader (London:

Cape, 1970)

Lauretis, Teresa de, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics

Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984)

Lee, Alison, Realism and Power: Postmodern British

Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990)

Levine, George, The Boundaries of Fiction (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1968)

---- The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction From

Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981)

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 'A Writing Lesson, ' in Tristes

Tropiques, tr. John Russell (New York: Criterion
Books, 1961), pp. 286-97

---- The Raw and the Cooked (London: Cape, 1970)

---- The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1966)

Lovell, Terry, Consuming Fiction (London: Verso, 1987)

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A

Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984)

MacCabe, Colin, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics,

Literature (Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1985)

McCafferty, Larry, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of

Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass
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(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

The Freud/Jung Letters, abridged by

McGuire, William, ed.,
Alan McGlashan (London: Picador, 1979)

Macherey, Literary Production, tr.

Pierre, A Theory of
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)
Geoffrey Wall (London:

Millett, (London: Virago, 1977)

Kate, Sexual Politics
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396

Moi, Toril, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen,

1985)

Mulvey, Laura, 'Feminism, Film in

and the Avant Garde, '
Framework, 10 (Spring 1979), 3-10

---- 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, ' in Screen,

16, No. 3 (Autumn 1975), 6-18

Nyquist, Mary, 'Protesting Too Much: Feminist Discourse

Under Pressure, ' Popular Feminist Papers, No. 8
(Toronto: Centre for Women's Studies in Education,
1987)

Philips, John A., Eve: The History of an Idea (San

Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984)

Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin:

University of Texas, 1968)

Raymond, Janice, The Transsexual Empire (London: Women's

Press, 1980)

Rigney, Barbara Hill, Lilith's Daughters: Women and

Religion in Contemporary Fiction (Wisconsin:
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Riley, Denise, 'Am I That Name? ' Feminism and the

Category of 'Women' in History (London: Macmillan,
1988)

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary

Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983)

Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision

(London: Verso, 1986)

Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the

American Dream (New York: Avon, 1974)

Coover's Pinocchio in
Rushdie, Salman, review of Robert
Venice, Independent On Sunday, 28 April 1991, p. 30

Saroyan, Aram, introduction to Jack Kerouac's Tristessa

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978)

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Gallimard, 1948)

Shattuck, Simon Watson Taylor, eds., Selected

Roger, and
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Works of Alfred Jarry,
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Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British

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Bronte
1978)
Bibliography 3
397
Sousa, Ronald W., 'Once Within a Room, ' introduction to
Clarice Lispector's The Passion according to G. H.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 'Displacement and the
Discourse of Woman, ' in Displacement: Derrida and
After, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983), pp. 169-95

---- 'Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle, ' Diacritics, 14, No. 4
(Winter 1984), 19-36

Stimpson, Catherine R., Where the Meanings Are: Feminism

and Cultural Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1988)

Sturrock, John, Structuralism (London: Paladin, 1986)

Warner, Marina, Alone of All her Sex (New York: Knopf,
1976)

Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe,

Richardson and Fielding (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963)

Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of

Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984)

Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963)

Williams, Linda, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and 'The

Frenzy of the Visible' (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.

E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968)

Wittig, Monique, 'Paradigm, ' in Homosexualities and French

Literature: Cultural Contexts Critical Texts, ed.
George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1979), pp. 114-21

---- 'One is not Born a Woman, ' Feminist Issues, 1, No. 2

(Winter 1981), 47-54

Young, Robert, 'Post-Structuralism: The End of Theory,

Oxford Literary Review, 5, Nos. 1/2 (1982), 3-20

Zipes, Jack, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New

York: Methuen, 1988)
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 4

Works of Literature by Authors Other than Angela Carter

(Where the edition of a twentieth-century that

work
has been used is not the first edition this is indicated
after the title. )

Acker, Kathy, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove,

1988)

---- In Memoriam to Identity (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,

1990)

Allende, Isabel, Eva Luna (1987), tr. Margaret Sayers

Peden (New York: Bantam Books, 1989)

---- Of Love and Shadows (1984), tr. Margaret Sayers Peden

(New York, Knopf, 1987)

---- The House of Spirits (1982), tr. Magda Bogin (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1985)

Atwood, Margaret, Bodily Harm (1981) (London: Virago,

1983)

---- The Edible Woman (1969) (London: Virago, 1980)

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) (London: Cape, 1986)

----
Ballard, J. G., Empire of the Sun (London: Gollancz,
1984)

Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood (1937) (New York: New

Directions, 1961)

Barnes, Julian, Flaubert's Parrot (1984) (London:

Picador, 1985)

Barth, John, Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus

(1966) (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967)

Barthelme, Donald, Snow White (1967) (London: Cape, 1968)

Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Libraire

Generale Francais, 1972)

Beckett, Samuel, (1938) (London: Picador, 1973)

Murphy
Bibliography 4 399

Blake, William, 'Milton, ' and 'A Vision of the Last

Judgment, ' in The Complete Writings of William Blake,
ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Random House, 1958)

Borges, Jorge, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other

Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962)

Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim's Progress (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1960)

Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities (1972), tr. William

Weaver (London: Picador, 1979)

Coetzee, J. M., Foe (London: Secker and Warbarg, 1986)

---- Life & Times of Michael K (London: Secker and

Warbarg, 1983)

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness (1902) (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1973)

Coover, Robert, Pricksongs and Descants (1969) (New York:

Plume, 1970)

The Public Burning (1977) (London: Allen Lane, 1978)

----

Diski, Jenny, Nothing Natural (1986) (London: Minerva,

1990)

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, tr. Constance

Garnett (Toronto: Bantam, 1981)

Dunn, Katherine, Geek Love (1983) (New York: Warner,

1990)

Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose (1980), tr. William

Weaver (London: Picador, 1984)

Eliot, T. S., 'The Waste Land, ' in Collected Poems 1909-

1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp-61-79

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)

Eliot, George, Middlemarch

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966)

Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones

Finn, Frankie, Out the Plain (London: The Women's

on
Press, 1984)

Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, tr. Alan Russell

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950)

(1965) (revised edition, London:

Fowles, John, The Magus
Cape, 1977)

Herland (London: The Women's

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins,
Press, 1979)
Bibliography 4 400

Gray, Alistair, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981) (London:

Granada, 1982)

Hayton, Sian, Cells of Knowledge (Edinburgh: Polygon

Press, 1989)

Hoban, Russell, Riddley Walker (1980) (London: Picador,

1982)

Hoffmann, E. T. A., Tales of Hoffmann, tr. R. J.

Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)

Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a

Justified Sinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981)

James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw and Other Short

Stories (New York: Signet, 1962)

Kerouac, Jack, On the Road (1957) (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1972)

---- Tristessa (1960) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978)

Lee, Hermione, ed., The Secret Self: Short Stories b

Women (London: Dent, 1985)

LeGuin, Ursula K., The Left Hand of Darkness (New York:

Walker and Company, 1969)

Lessing, Doris, Shikasta (London: Cape, 1979)

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

----
(London: Cape, 1983)

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

----
(London: Cape, 1980)

The Sentimental Agents (London: Cape, 1983)

----

The Sirian Experiments (London: Cade-, 1981)

----
Lispector, Clarice, The Passion According to G. H. (1964),
tr. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988)

Lodge, David, How Far Can You Go (1980) (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1981)

Maitland, Spells (London: Methuen, 1988)

Sara, A Book of

Telling Tales: Short Stories (London: Journeyman

----
Press, 1983)
(1921) (Oxford:
Mare, Walter de la, Memoirs of a Midget
Oxford University Press, 1982)
Bibliography 4 401

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, Collected Stories (New York:

Harper and Row, 1984)

---- One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), tr. Gregory

Rabassa (London: Picador, 1978)

Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes (New

York: Macmillan, 1985)

Morrison, Toni, Beloved (1987) (London: Picador, 1988)

Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita (1959) (London: Corgi, 1961)

---- Pale Fire (1962) (London: Corgi, 1964)

Naylor, Gloria, Mama Day (London: Hutchinson, 1988)

Oates, Joyce Carol, Bellefleur (1980) (London: Cape,

1981)

---- Mysteries of Winterthurn (London: Cape, 1984)

---- The Bloodsmoor Romance (1982) (London: Cape, 1983)

Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1955)

Poe, Edgar Allan, 'Annabel Lee, ' in The Norton Anthology

of American Literature, Vol. 1 (New York: Norton,
1979), pp. 1225-26

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings

----
(1967) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986)

Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) (New York:

Penguin, 1987)

Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children (1980) (London:

Picador, 1982)

The Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988)

----
Russ, The Female Man (1975) (Boston: Gregg, 1977)
Joanna,

Sade, Marquis de, Three Complete Novels: Justine

Philosophy in the Bedroom, Eugenie de Franva and
Other Writings (New York: Grove, 1966)

Sartre, Jean Paul, Nausea (1938), tr. Robert Baldick

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)

Shakespeare, The Tempest (Arden edition) (London:

William,
Methuen, 1964)

Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1980)
Bibliography 4 402

Sollers, Philippe, Femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983)

Sorrentino, Gilbert, Odd Number (San Francisco: North
Point, 1985)

Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (New York: Norton,

1980)

Swift, Jonathan, 'Gulliver's Travels' and Other Writings

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)

Tennant, Emma, Alice Fell (1980) (London: Picador, 1982)

---- Sisters and Strangers (Grafton, 1990)

---- The Bad Sister (1978) (London: Picador, 1979)

Weldon, Fay, Leader of the Band (1988) (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1989)

---- Puffball (1980) (London: Coronet Books, 1981)

---- The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983) (London:

Coronet Books, 1984)

Winterson, Jeanette, Oranges are not the only Fruit (1985)

(New York: Atlantic, 1987)

---- ed. Passion Fruit: Romantic Fiction with a Twist

(London: Pandora, 1986)

---- Sexing the Cherry (1989) (London: Vintage, 1990)

The Passion (1987) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988)

----

Wittig, Monique, Les Guerilleres (1969) (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1985)

Woolf, Virginia, The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska

(New York: New York Public Library, 1977)

Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London:

Macmillan, 1963)

Zipes, Jack (ed), Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary

Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England
(Aldershot: Gower, 1986)
 APPENDIX

REVIEWS OF ANGELA CARTER'S WORKS

(This list is organised according to individual works by

Angela Carter arranged in chronological order. Under each
title reviews are listed chronologically, with the date
shown as year/month/day. )
 40"T
SHADOW
DANCE

Date Journal Volute Page Title Author

66/07/03Observer(London) 22 Old Etonianon the CouchMaryHolland

66/07/08NewStatesman 72 61 EdwinMorgan

66/07/15Spectator 18 18 Sinister Street DavidGalloway

66/08/04TimesLiterary Supplement 701 Scarface

66/08/24Punch 304-05 First Novels B. A. Young

66/09/00BooksandBooknen 11 63

66/11/01Kirkus Review 34 1158

66/11/28Publishers'Weekly 190:2 59 BarbaraA. Bannon

67/01/01Library Journal 92 132

67/02/03NewYorkTimes 116 29 ShockDisarmed Eliot Fremont-Smith

67/02/13Newsweek 69 112,116PaperPuppets S. S.

67/02/18SaturdayReview 50, No.7 36 M. Potaker

A Galleryof Grotesques Edward

67/02/19NewYorkTimesBook 69 44 Grotesque JohnBowen

Review

67/03/04NewYorker 163

57 ComfortablySurreal Ian Hamilton

67/07/13 Listener

68/03/00Choice 5 46

33 115 E. Portnoy
85/00/00Maatstaf
17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick
86/10/00 Village Voice Literary
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 4°S
THEMAGIC
TOYSHOP

Date Journal VolumePage Title Author

67/07/06TimesLiterary Supplement 593 Bizarre

67/07/13Listener 78 57 Comfortably
Surreal Ian Hamilton

67/09/00 Booksand Bookmen 12 40 EugeneGeorgeGoesfor EugeneGeorge

the Gothic

67/12/01Kirkus Review 35 1432

67/12/25Publisher'sWeekly 192 56

68/02/01Library Journal 93 570

NewYorker 44 133-44

68/02/15Best Sellers 446

68/02/25 NewYork TimesBook 38 Dark Fantasy JohnWakeman

Review

68105101
Booklist 64 1022

81/07/04TheTimes 7d GothicandEveryday CarolineMoorehead

81/07/10NewStatesman 102 16 andDebutsJudyCooke

Rediscoveries

81/07/12Observer(London) 37 Fablesfor the Modern LornaSage

World

81/08/21TimesEducational 19a of Unreason,MyraBarrs

Connoisseur
Supplement of the
Champion
Instinctual

British BookNews
82105100 276 Some Writers
Women MargaretCrosland

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary Magic: TheMany WalterKendrick

17-19 Rough
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 4X
SEVE
RALPERCEPTIONS

Date Journal Volume

Page Title Author

68/07/28Observer(London) 23

68/08/01Listener 80 152 Alice in Dropoutland JohnHemmings

It TimesLiterary Supplement 817 BlackInnocence

69/01/13PublishersWeekly 194 84 BarbaraA. Bannon

69/03/02NewYorkTimesBook 42 Logicin a RichardBoston

Review World
Schizophrenic's

69/03/15Library Journal 94 1158

" NewYorker 45 180

69/05/01Booklist 65 996

70/10/25Observer(London) 32 Celia Kent

Village VoiceLiterary
86110/00 Magic: TheKany WalterKendrick
17-19Rough
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 407
OESANDVILLAINS
HER

Date Journal VolumePave Title Author

69/11/09Observer(London) 34 TheColonel'sDaughters Stephen
Wall
69/11/13Listener 82 614 Silly Woman Stuart Hood

69/11/14NewStatesman 78 702 Organisation

Man James
Fenton

69/11/20TimesLiterary Supplement 1329 Facingthe Past

70107101
Kirkus Review 38 698

70/09/01Best Sellers 30 211-12 JohnS, Phillipson

70109/13
NewYorkTimesBook 62 TheySurviveda Nuclear RichardBoston
Review War

79/07106
Publishers'Weekly 198 55 BarbaraA. Bannon

81/07/04TheTimes 7d GothicandEveryday CarolineMoorehead

81/07/10NewStatesman 102 16 andDebutsJudyCooke

Rediscoveries

81/07/12Observer(London) 37 Fablesfor the Modern LornaSage

World

81/08/21TimesEducational 19a of UnreasonMyraBarrs

Connoisseur
Supplement

British BookNews
81109100 515 HeadlinesandFootnotes Neil Philip

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary Magic: TheMany WalterKendrick

17-19 Rough
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter

89/06/00Village VoiceLiterary 15 the Ruins

LoveAmong DorothyAllison
Supplement
 4°c
LOVE

Date Journal Volume

Page Title Author

71/05/16Observer(London) 33 FromBehindthe Wall JohnColeman

71/05/20Listener 85 656 Unceasingly

Thankful Anita VanVactor

71/05/21NewStatesman 81 711 Mannerists Jonathan

Keats

71/06/18TimesLiterary Supplement 693 Private Lives

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary 17-19Rough

Magic: TheMany WalterKendrick
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter

87105/22TheGuardian Mirror Images LornaSage

88/05/00Books 10 MichaelBarber

89/06/00Village VoiceLiterary 15 the Ruins

LoveAmong DorothyAllison
Supplement
 409
THEINFERNAL
DESIRE OFDOCTOR
MACHINES HOFFMAN

Date Journal VolumePage Title Author

72/05/14Observer(London) 36 Novels Stephen
Wall
72/05/20 Spectator 228 772-73TheSurreal Thing AuberonWaugh

72/05/25Listener 87 693 CountryColoureds ValentineCunningham

72/06/02TimesLiterary Supplement 622 Sinister Slices

72/07/21NewStatesman 84 99 Devilled Pud BarryCole

73/03/00Foundation 3 69-71 Marionetteswithin Hay

George
Metaphysics

73/09/00BooksandBookmen 18 138

74/06/15Kirkus Review 42 647 TheWarof Dreams

74/07/01Publishers'Weekly 206 75 BarbaraA. Bannon

74/08/00Library Journal 99 1988

74/08/18 BookWorld (Washington 3 DreamsFantasies, A J. D. O'Hara

Post) Momentof Truth With a
Rhinoceros

74/09/08 NewYork TimesBook 6-7 FancyFantasy: TheWar William Hjortsberg

Review of Dreams

74/0915 Best Sellers 34 276-17 Irene N. Pompea

75/00/00Prairie Schooner 49 174-76TheWarof Dreams LeeT. Lemon

75/01/27ABBookman's
Weekly 55 347-49Fiction dolee

82/05/02Observer(London) 30 Choice
Paperback

82/0730 NewStatesman 104 21 Harriet Gilbert

86/06/00FantasyReview 9 18 Transformation
andDesireLaurel Tryforos
Anderson

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary 17-19 Magic:

Rough TheMany WalterKendrick
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 410
FIREWORKS:
MINI PROFAJE
PIECES

Date Journal Volume

Page Title Author
74/08/10EveningStandard A Loverwith Strings Auberon
Waugh
Attached

74/08/16NewStatesman 88 229 RealCities Victoria Glendinning

74/08/18Observer(London) 28 Coming
Apartat the Seams
LornaSage
14/08/23TimesLiterary Supplement 897 OnlyReflect

74/09/05 The Times Short Stories

74/09/17Northamptonshire
Evening Fireworksthat Fall and
Telegraph Explode

74/09/26Listener 92 41708Dites andAeroplanes

74/09/28 The BirminghamPost few Fiction AnthonyMasters

74/10/15 NottinghamUniversity Robert Graves

Gangster

75/02/00BooksandBookmen 55 GothicPyrotechnics James

Brockway

81/03/15Kirkus Review 370

81/04/03Publishers'Weekly 219 68-9 BarbaraA. Bannon

81/04/15Library Journal 106 901 Judith T. Yamamoto

81/05/01Booklist 17 1186

81/06/14NewYorkTimesBook 86 14,18Stories andNovels DavidQuaoien

Review

81/06/28BookWorld(Washington 11 5-6 AngelaCarter: Tasting MicheleSlung

Post) Sinister Fruits

83/09/00NorthAmerican
Review 268 68-72NineStory-Tellers RichardOrodenker

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary Magic: TheMany WalterKendrick

17-19Rough
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter

87/05/22TheGuardian Mirror images LornaSage

87/08/00Books 22 DesertIsland Books KazuoIshiguro

88/06/03NewStatesman 115 27 If Readingbe the Loveof JennyDiski

Food

88/07/03GuardianWeekly 29 ChristinaKoning
 411
THEPASSION
OFIBWEVE

Date Journal VolumePage Tit Author

-
77/03/25NewStatesman 93 407 BeBad PaddyBeesley
77/03/26Spectator 238 23-24 PassionFruit PeterAckroyd

71/03127
Observer(London) 29 GlassMenagerie LornaSage

77/04/01Kirkus review 368

Publishers'Weekly 211 18 BarbaraA, Bannon

TimesLiterary Supplement 392 Gelding the Lily JohnRyle

77/0615 Library Journal 102 1404 BarryBaker

77/06/26Observer(London) 29

77/0701 Booklist 73 1631-32 CIP

77/12/18Observer(London) 21 LornaSage

78/00100World Literature Today 52 294 Noted L. B. Mittleman

81/06100
British BookNews 328 TheBritish Novel Martin Seymour-Smith
1976-1980

82/11/25TheTimes 10f MirandaSeymour

82/12/19Observer(London) 30 Paperback
Choice

83/01/21 TimesLiterary Supplement 69 PaperbackFiction in Patricia Craig

Brief

86/10/00 Village Voice Literary 17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick

Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter

87/00/00 Critical Quarterly 29/3 77 TheCentury's Daughters Lyn Pykett

 412
THEBLOODY
CHAMBER

Date Journal VolumePage Title Author

79/05/25NewStatesman 97 762 Gory Patricia Craig
79/05/27Sunday
Telegraph 12e Hankiesat the Ready JaniceElliot
79/06/03Observer(London) 36 Beautyandthe Beast LornaSage
79/06/14Daily Telegraph 15a RecentFiction SelinaHastings

79/07/07Spectator 243 23 Emma

Fisher

79/07/15Observer(London) 37

79/08/23Listener 102 254-55PsychicandMental JohnMellors

79/09/00BooksandBookmen 24 36-37 Metaphysical

Fairy WilliamBoyd
Stories

79/11/15Kirkus Review 47 1337

79/11/24TheTimes IID TheTimesBooksof the RichardHolies

Year

79/12/09Observer(London), 35 LornaSage

79/12/10Publishers'Weekly 216 55 BarbaraA. Bannon

80/00/00Sewanee
Review 88 414 TechnicsandPyrotechnics Garrett
George

80/01/10TheTimes 9a ShortStories JackyGillott

80/01/15Library Journal 105 223 Judith T. Yauoto

80/02/08 TimesLiterary Supplement 146 Manand Beast SusanKennedy

80102/17
NewYorkTimesBook 85 14-15 PleasureandPain AlanFriedman
Review

80/02/24BookWorld(Washington 1-2 You'veComeA LongWay CarolynHeilbrun

Post) RedRidinghood

80/03/10Time 115 82 Rorschachs PaulGray

80/03124The NewLeader 19-20 Mixing Myth and Polemic JoshuaGilder

80/04100
Best Sellers 40 4 TheBloodyChamber and FrancisH. Curtis
OtherAdult Tales

Ms. 8 32 Books
NewandRecommended

Review
80/07/00 Sewanee 88 412-23Technicsand PyrotechnicsGeorgeGarret

81/07/00 Ms. 10 90 BarbaraYastine

 413

Date Journal Volute Page Title Author

81/07/04TheTimes 7d GothicandEveryday CarolineMoorehead

81/07/05NewYorkTimesBook 86 19 Paperbacks:Newand
Review Noteworthy

81/07/10NewStatesman 102 16 andDebutsJudyCooke

Rediscoveries

81/07/12Observer(London) 37 Fablesfor the Modern LornaSage

World

81/08/21 TimesEducational 19a Connoisseurof Unreason, MyraBarrs

Supplement Championof the
Instinctual

81/09/00British BookNews 515 HeadlinesandFootnotes Heil Philip

82(03/00Village Voice Literary 18 Remainderama DebraRaeCohen

Supplement

86/10/00 Village Voice Literary 17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick

Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 414
?HBSADBIAA
VOKAA

Date Journal VolumePage Title Author

77/00/00Sunday
Times Learningto live with de DonaldThomas
Sade

77/03/20Sunday
Times 39 TheStylish MissCarter JohnMortimer

79/03125 TimesMagazine
Sunday 102c Paperbacks SelinaHastings

79/04/01Kirkus Review 47 420-21

Library Journal 104 829 Sally Michell

79/04/05Listener 101 496 SadeyLadies Patricia Beer

79/04/06NewStatesman 97 487-88Unfair Shares HertioneLee

Observer(London)
19104/08 37 Sexin the Head JohnWeightman

79/04/22 The GuardianWeekly 21 This Holy Terror Francis Huxley

79/05/15Booklist 75 1413

79/07/00BooksandBookmen 24 33/36 Sadeas Feminist Durgnat

Raymond

79/07/29NewYorkTidesBook 10 PositionPaper RichardGilman

Review

79/09/01NewRepublic 181 31 andthe RobinMorgan

Woman
TheSadeian
Ideology of Pornography
by AngelaCarter

79/10/06Nation 229 EgoWas...

312-13Where SloanAllen
James

BookReview 2:4 13 TheSadeian Mernit

andthe Susan
Woman
80/00/00American
Ideology of Pornography

25 35-36 TheBig P LaurieStone

80/02/00TheVillage Voice

102 18 At the Mercyof Men's MarionGlastonbury

81/11/06NewStatesman
Dreams

17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick

86/10/00 Village Voice Literary
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 415
NOTHING
SACRED

Date Journal Volume

Page Title Author

82/10/05Observer(London) 25 AngusWilson

82/10/31Observer(London) 30 Courage
of Conviction AngusWilson

82/11/05TimesEducational 25 TheEssay,Post-Orwell BernardCrick

Supplement

82/12/10NewStatesman 104 25 Parallel Bars Harriet Gilbert

" NewStatesman 104 40 ThePleasuresof Reading:Patricia Paulin

1982

83/03/03LondonReviewof Books 5 19 In an EnglishMarket TomPaulin

86/10/00 Village Voice Literary 17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick

Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 4l6
RIGHTS
AT THECIRCUS

Date Journal Volume

Page Title Author
84/09/27TheTimes 9a Spangles
of Old Sawdust ElaineFeinstein
84/09/28NewStatesman 108 30-31MorningAfter the Right Harriet Gilbert
Before

TimesLiterary Supplement 1083 FromWondersto Prodigies AdamMars-Jones

84109/30
Observer(London) 20 High-WireFantasy ValentineCunningham

84/10/00BooksandBookeen 16 Fitful Glimpses KathyStephen

84/10/04LondonReviewof Books 6 16-17Stories of Blackand MichaelWood

White

84110/11Listener 112 30 Onthe Game JohnMellors

84/12/00Kirkus Review 52 1105

84/12/21NewStatesman 110 43-44

85/00/00 BLMBonniers Litterara 54 38708Saganoa DenKvinnan Lisbeth Larsson

Magasin

85/01/00British BookNews 47 GeoffreyTrease

41 Library Journal 110 99 DennisPendleton

to SaturdayReview 11 79 BruceVanWyngarden

85/02/03Washington
Post 1,13 AngelaCarter's Flights CarolynBanks
of Fancy

85/02/24NewYorkTimesBook 8 7 OnandSeethe
Come CarolynSee
Review WingedLady

85/02/25Time 125 87 Onthe Wingsof a NewAgePaulClay

85/05/20NewRepublic 192 38-41Wild Women,

BraveMen AmyB. Schwartz

85/09/14TheTimes 14 KathyO'Shaughnessy

85/11/00BooksandBookmen 38

86/03/02BookWorld(Washington 16 12
Post)

86/04/13NewYorkTimesBook 38 Patricia T. O'Connor

Review

BookReview
86/05/00American 12-13ThreeRingCircus RichardMartin

86/06/00 FantasyReview 9 18 Transformationand Desire Laurel AndersonTryforos

86/10/00 Village Voice Literary 17-19 RoughMagic: TheMany Walter Kendrick

Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter
 417
THESE
UNTO
COME YELLOW
SAIDS

Date Journal VolutePage Title Author

British BookNews
85/00100 752

85/10/18TimesLiterary Supplement 1169 Breakingthe Spell of the LornaSage

Past

85/11/00SpareRib BarbaraS.ith
36-39FroaClassicalArchetypes
to ModernStereotypes

to Review
Women's 28-29Mythsandthe Erotic AnneSmith

LondonReviewof Books
85112/05 24 Angelaandthe Beast Patricia Craig

LondonReviewof Books 24 Angelaand the Beast Patricia Craig

 418
BLACK
VENUS

Date Journal Volute Page Title Author

85/10/12 GlasgowHerald Grave-Robbing
Touchto DouglasDunn
Productsfror the
Literary Laboratories

85/10/17Guardian 27 Hall of Mirrors Lisa St Aubinde Teran

85/10/18NewStatesman 110 28-29 Putting on the Style GraceIngoldby

I' Tines Literary Supple®ent 1169 Breakingthe Spell of the Lorna Sage
Fast

85/11/00FantasyReview 8 23 Ron-Fantastic
Brilliance ChrisMorgan

" SpareRib 36-39 FromClassicalArchetypes

BarbaraSmith
to ModernStereotypes

Women's
Review 28-29 Mythsandthe Erotic AnneSmith

85/11116
Spectator 255 37 NeitherObscene
nor MirandaSeymour
Pornographic

85/11/20Punch 94-5 ShortStories

85/11/24Observer(London) 28 VanishingIreland PaulBailey

85/12/05LondonReviewof Books 24 Angelaandthe Beast Patricia Craig

86/00/00AntiochReview,The 44 495

86/01/00Booksin Canada 15 17-19 Servedwith a Twist Terry Goldie

If News 274
Illustrated London 77 andDeathin
Darkness Sally Emerson
London

86/01/24TimesEducational 34 Mackay
Bitter SweetCollections Shena
Supplement

86/06/27Publishers'Weekly 229 74 Stuttaford

Genevieve

86/07/01Kirkus Reveiw 54 952

86/08/00Booklist 82 1661

" Library Journal 111 168 Marcia Tager

86/08/10BookWorld(Washington 16 5,14 TheCabinetof Angela MichaelBishop

Post) Carter

86/09/07 NewYork TimesBook 1,29 A Makerof MagicSouffles CharlesNewman

Review

86/09/21LosAngelesTimesBook 13 Holly Prado

Review
 419

Date Journal Voluue Page Title Author

86/10/00Village VoiceLiterary 17-19 Rough

Magic: TheMany WalterKendrick
Supplement Splendoursof Angela
Carter

86/10/04Nation 243 315-17ThePost-Lapsarian

Eve AnnSnitow

86/11100
WilsonLibrary Journal 61 71 ElizabethShostak

86/12/00ScienceFiction Chronicle8 20

86/12/22NewRepublic 195 38-41 History andHistrionics JenniferKrauss

87/00/00Hudson
Review,The 40 147-48 MichaelGorra

88/01/03NewYorkTimesBook 93 22
Review

89/10/09Publisher's Weekly 232 83

 4Zo
GIRLSANDWICKED
WAYWARD NOMBJ

Date Journal VolutePage Title Author

86/11/21NewStatesman 112 28 But the KitchenSink Hichelene

Wandor

86/12/00BooksandBookeen 46

86/12/19TiaesLiterary Suppleient 1428 Refusingto Learn Jo-AnnGoodwin

87/01/01Listener 117 22-23 BadGirls by the ScoreJohnMellors

89/06/00 Village Voice Literary 15-17 BadGirls Rule Stacy D'Braseo

Suppleient
 III
THEVIRAGO OFFAIRYTALES
BOOK

Date Journal VolutePage Title Author

90/10/21Observer(London) Well WickedTiies by WordLaurisMorgan-Griffiths

of Mouth

90/10/25TheGuardian 32 Tell-tale Sisters PaulMansfield

90/12/16NewYorkTimesBook 35
Review

i^ ýd